Will Palin Announce Presidential Bid at Tea Party Conference?

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


The Tea Party Patriots, arguably the nation’s largest tea party umbrella group, is holding a “policy summit” in Phoenix at the end of the month to help educate tea partiers on various issues. Headlining the event will be potential GOP presidential contenders Herman Cain and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), right-wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart, talking heads Dick Morris and John Fund, and other conservative luminaries and elected officials. But lately the group has been floating rumors that Sarah Palin may show up at the confab to make an important announcement: that she’s running for president.

Earlier this month, TPP started circulating emails with a prominent endorsement for their event from Palin, who says in the promo material that the summit “offers a terrific opportunity for true American Patriots to hear from experts on issues like lowering taxes, balancing the budget and repealing Obamacare.” Then on Thursday, Everett Wilkinson, a TPP coordinator in Florida, wrote on his site Tea Party Wire, “I just heard a rumor that Sarah Palin is going to make a surprise visit and announcement” at the conference. He included a link to the registration page for the summit, and also circulated emails with the rumor to tea party activists.

Is this a “real” rumor—or just a crass marketing ploy designed to entice tea partiers to the $75 per-person gathering? It would not be the first time that a tea party group tried to capitalize on Palin’s name recognition to boost attendance at a conference. Last year, Tea Party Nation, a Nashville-based group headed by Judson Philips, created a convention almost exclusively promoted around a speech by Palin, for which TPN paid her $100,000.

A spokesman for Tea Party Patriots says the group is not paying any of the speakers at its event (and that it didn’t pay Palin for her endorsement of the summit). But the Internet rumor smacks of traffic-driving scheme, an attempt to generate interest and potentially donations for the summit, or at least traffic for Wilkinson’s Tea Party Wire site. TPP is trying to raise a boatload of money to pull off the event, and there are signs that it’s not meeting its targets.

On its website, TPP indicates that it’s trying to generate more than $800,000 in sponsorships for the event. The primary summit sponsorship comes with a price tag of $250,000—an amount they’re not likely to squeeze out of a bunch of rural tea party activists. Booths in the exhibit hall run as high as $4,000. The group has been advertising heavily on Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity’s radio shows, and sources say that TPP has not raised enough money to fly many of its own regional and state coordinators to Phoenix for the summit as promised.

TPP wouldn’t be the first group to try to hold a national tea party convention and flop. Tea Party Nation attempted to hold another convention in Las Vegas this past summer. It was postponed at the last minute, rescheduled for a few months later, and canceled again. Tea partiers, it seems, have had their fill of conventions, a phenomenon that makes the rumors about a Palin cameo highly suspicious. The Tea Party Nation’s Nashville event appears only to have succeeded with the help of Palin. Without her, the Tea Party Patriots may find themselves in the same boat as Phillips’ group.

UPDATE: Randy Lewis, a spokesman for TPP says, “Palin was approached for availability for the weekend of our conference and we were told that she was unable to consider due to a previous commitment. She is not attending.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate