COMMENTARY | According to Real Clear Politics, Sarah Palin has found her history tour of the American northeast so successful that she will soon take similar bus trips to the Midwest and American south.
Just by coincidence, the Midwest trip would end up in Iowa and the Southern junket will end in South Carolina. Iowa has the first national party caucus and South Carolina is an early primary state which votes soon after New Hampshire.
Clearly Palin is conducting a test run of what may be the most unusual presidential campaign in recent American history. She means to bypass the Republican Party establishment, including the cadre of precinct chairman whom political candidates usually cater to, and take her case directly to the voters. Many pundits regard this as a mistake and even a sign Palin has no intention of running. The party apparatus is considered crucial for creating on the ground organization that a candidate needs to get out the vote.
Palin may be thinking of a different model, one that seems to have worked in the past two or so years to shake the political foundations of the United States: the Tea Party movement.
The Tea Party has not been a hierarchical organization in the classic sense. It is one example of what law professor and Instapundit Glenn Reynolds calls an "Army of Davids," in which individuals band together, self-organize, and go forth to effect change. The Tea Party has been wildly successful in this, putting hundreds of thousands of people in the streets and organizing voters for the 2010 election.
It could be that Palin is thinking along these lines if she pulls the trigger on a presidential run in 2012. Activists, bound together by social media, would band together and work cooperatively to elect Palin, just as the Tea Party worked together to oppose President Obama and get more conservatives elected in 2010.
Could such a model work? There are many pundits who doubt it. But if Palin were to use such a model and it succeeded in electing her president of the United States, the political rule book will have been rewritten in ways that will not be easy to predict.
Sources: Palin to Visit S.C. as Part of Early-State Trifecta, Scott Conroy, Real Clear Politics, June 1, 2011
An Army of Davids, Glenn Reynolds, Thomas Nelson, 2007
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