Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had been making big headlines even before her speech on Saturday in front of a group of conservative activists gathering in Washington, D.C.
In an interview before the speech, she said that unlike nearly every Mitt Romney supporter in the country, she might welcome a brokered convention. "I don't think that it would be a negative for the party, a brokered convention," she said. "That's part of the competition, that's part of the process. And it may happen."
She didn't go so far as to call for a brokered convention in her speech to members of the Conservative Political Action Committee. But she did give a shout-out to the benefits of competition.
"Competition elevates our game. Competition will lead us to victory in 2012," she told a fired-up, "Sarah" chanting crowd. And although she never mentioned him by name, she did, as one person in attendance put it, "put a knife into" Mitt Romney.
Palin told the crowd that she is looking for someone who will ignore "bullying campaign expert advisers," who aren't fit to run for "dogcatcher" but will tell a candidate what to say.
"Our candidate must be someone who will instinctively turn right," she said. "It's too late in the process to spin it."
The lines got major applause. By this point in the speech though, they were an applause-happy crowd. If nothing else, Sarah Palin knows how to read the mood of a audience and to give it what it most wants. What this one wanted, at least initially, was red meat, and she gave it to them raw by the bucket with lines like, "We aren't blue Americans. We aren't red Americans. We are red, white and blue, and President Obama, we are through with you."
And, "President Obama….Keep your change, we'll keep our God, our guns, our constitution."
And perhaps the best zinger of the speech: "When was the last time you saw EPA block construction of new government building? Maybe instead of calling Washington a swamp, we should call it a wetland."
So by the time she got to the competition part of the speech, and by the time she got to excoriating what she often refers to as the "permanent political class," she had them ready to listen.
"This was a very sophisticated speech," said Stephen Bannon, who wrote and directed the pro-Palin movie "The Undefeated" and who was in the crowd. "By the time she started talking about the permanent political class, the audience leaned into it. There was huge energy in the room. It wasn't even comparable," to the other speeches, including those given by the presidential candidates at the event, he said. Her speech, he said, was "better than all of the others combined to the tenth power."
Bannon said that after the speech, one member in the audience turned to him and said, "Imagine what could have been."
It was Palin's first major speech since she spoke at a tea party rally in Iowa in last September. There, in an Iowa corn field, she tantalized those who wanted her to announce a presidential run by talking about her "plan" for the country. It was a "bona fide working man's plan," she told the crowd. And the working men and women in the crowd ate it up, sure that she was going to be the next president.
Although there is a small sliver who still think that Palin might jump in the race, few in the room at this speech believed it. For most Palinistas, she is now a party leader and an activist, someone who sets the agenda and will lead them down the best path.
Peter Singleton, who spent a year away from his home in California to Iowa to organize for Palin in Iowa when he was sure she was going to run, was at the conference. He said that for him it was really never about Sarah Palin, rather it was about principles and ideals. He still believes that she will continue to have a big voice in the party.
"She's still sets the agenda on our side, the conservative side," he said. "Nobody else had the kind of reception at the conference that she had."
Contact Amanda Coyne at Amanda@alaskadispatch.com