Sarah Palin lights up conservative conference

“More background checks? Dandy idea, Mr. President,” she said, blazing away at the president’s gun-control efforts. “Should’ve started with yours.”

But Mrs. Palin, the unsuccessful candidate for the vice-presidency in 2008 who abruptly resigned her post in Juneau a year later, did not disclose any hints to her own political future beyond a call to delegates to comb the nation’s school boards and Tea Party rallies for suitable candidates for future elections.

This fall, according to a publisher’s news release, she will release “a fun, festive, thought provoking book” that will encourage readers “to see what is possible when we unite in defence of our faith and ignore the politically correct Scrooges who would rather take Christ out of Christmas.” But even this opus went unplugged at CPAC in favour of sniping at “the permanent political class in Washington” that she once campaigned to join.

Introduced by Calgary-born Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas as a wise Mahatma who “drives the mainstream media bat-crap crazy,” Mrs. Palin drew repeated standing ovations from hundreds of the Caucasian collegians who made up the vast majority of CPAC attendees. But few of the contra-liberals who whooped at her punch lines declared that they would support her at the ballot box, should she decide to run for the White House in 2016.

Several hours after Mrs. Palin spoke, the results of the annual CPAC straw poll were revealed, relegating her to 10th place out of more than 60 putative Republican candidates. Libertarian Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio led the survey, which was skewed by the refusal of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to be listed.

Mrs. Palin was preceded to the stage on Saturday by a panoply of former, failed presidential hopefuls, including former Speaker Newt Gingrich, who delivered a lengthy monologue about the invention of the electric light bulb, and Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who excoriated the president for exposing the United States to “enemies waging deadly cyber-attacks,” for employing five chefs aboard his personal aircraft and two full-time cinema projectionists in the White House, for consorting in Las Vegas with Beyoncé and Jay-Z, and for not wanting to cure cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, or juvenile diabetes.

“We are the people who truly care about people in this country,” Rep. Bachmann said. “We’ll get gas to $2 a gallon — half the current price — because we have the uniquely American life blood as our signature. We do it because we love, we do this because we care, this is the movement of love.”

Following this romantic manifesto, Sarah Palin prescribed “an adult conversation about our country” that would have to begin with an acceptance of Mr. Obama’s re-election.

“We came in second, out of two,” she said. “Second on the dogsled team, the view never changes and it ain’t a pretty view.”

“Remember no drama Obama?” Mrs. Palin asked. “Now it’s ALL-drama Obama. We don’t have leadership coming out of Washington, we have reality television — except its really bad reality TV, and the American people tuned out a long time ago.”

In a dig at New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s attempt to restrict the sale of Alaska-sized containers of sweetened soft drinks, Mrs. Palin interrupted her customary paean to cowboys, fishermen and hockey Moms to slurp from a Big Gulp cola she had stashed behind the podium.