Earlier today I asked on Twitter: by the way, does anybody know who told sarah palin to stay home? #CPAC.
There's been plenty of assertions in the blogosphere that her not showing up at CPAC means it's a guarantee that she won't run for president in 2012. I would have to agree with that assessment.
Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent has an article today (At CPAC, Tea Party Movement Re-Enters Conservative Fold") that could explain Palin's absence.
Mitt Romney may not have truly embraced the Tea Party, but Weigel points out how he sure did sound like it yesterday while addressing CPAC:
“God bless every American who said ‘No!’” said Romney. “It is right and praiseworthy to say no to bad things. It is right to say no to cap-and-trade, no to card check, no to government health care, and no to higher taxes.”
The audience at this annual conference — one where he has regularly won the presidential straw poll, but one where he’d never been quite adopted as a true son of the movement — roared with approval. Romney had been introduced by Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), who never mentioned his party affiliation during his insurgent special election bid, but used it twice before the CPAC crowd. Romney, said Brown, was one of the “leading lights” of the GOP.
If Weigel is right that the Tea Party movement gets folded back into the GOP--or at least a significant portion of it--this might explain why Palin is a no-show at CPAC. After all, she's not really all that welcome in the mainstream Republican party any longer. And if the Tea Party gets absorbed by the Republicans again, then she'll be out of luck there, too.
Of course, it's not really about politics these days anyway, right? CPAC must not have been willing to pay $100,000 for a handful of notes.



So the Question of the Day is this: Will you read Sarah Palin's Going Rogue: An American Life? What would it take?