Sarah Palin’s actual career took off nearly four years ago at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Mn., when she delivered the joke that made her a household name. “I love those hockey moms. You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.”
Political pundits and the media deemed Palin’s convention speech a success, thanks in part to that joke. Those same political pundits “spent some of the last few yeas in her thrall, going so far as to suggest that she could be a real challenger or even the front runner for the last Republican presidential nomination,” according to msnbc’s Lawrence O’Donnell.
But Sarah Palin didn’t want to further her political career. So when she quit her Alaska governorship halfway through her term, what pundits “mistakenly saw as laying the groundwork for a possible presidential campaign” was an illusion.
“That moment was the moment Sarah Palin was wisely declaring ‘I will never be a candidate for anything ever again,’ and most of the political media didn’t get it because she didn’t specifically say those words. Nothing could have been more obvious,” O’Donnell said Monday night. “She was sick of the investigations in Alaska, sick of the audits of her spending of campaign money, sick of the kind of scrutiny and the kind of ethical standards politicians must live with. But what was also obvious was that she loved stardom, she loved fame, and she loved the dollar value of fame, which she immediately translated into best selling authorship and book tours.”
On Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Palin had plenty of jokes for the crowd, taking aim at President Obama, gun control efforts, and soda bans. msnbc’s The Last Word has put together her comedic stylings. The political pundits who believed that Sarah Palin had a lasting political career actually “gravely misunderstood Sarah Palin for so long and failed to comprehend on the day she quit her governorship, she was quitting politics and entering show business,” O’Donnell said.
Watch her entire speech below:
Clare Kim