President Palin: Doing a great Tina Fey at convention

WHEN I CHECKED IN to the Tea Party convention Saturday night it appeared that President Sarah Palin was doing her Tina Fey impersonation, which she does so well. There was no letup in her personal amusement from her zingers, her arm gestures, her chirps that sought out high C. The audience loved it and she walked away with $100,000 or more for an hour or so of friendly political advice. She has risen above the presidency, which she said she would be willing to seek, to being a celebrity of biblical proportions. When she was asked during the Q. & A. what she would do to fix America's most serious problems, she conceded nothing about her own ascendancy when she declaredwe would be wise to seek "divine intervention." As she has so often said, she is waiting for God to open another door for her.

Actually, the narrative was fairly mild rhetoric as convention speeches go. She spent a lot of time attacking Obama as a "professor of law" instead of a commander- in-chief leading the war against terrorism. I think that was quite intentional for her to dwell on international terrorism to demonstrate that she is now qualified to deal with the real world - a deficit that plagued her during the last presidential campaign. She is pressing all of the red-meat conservative buttons: patriotism, elitists who don't appreciate the pain of the oppressed, the heavy hand of government, the love of America, Ronald Reagan.

The Reagan gambit reminds me of the time in Sicily when I told my guide that although I understood Italian I didn't understand a word he was saying. "That's because," he explained in English, "I put an r in the middle of my words to make them sound prettier." So it is with those conservatives who never stop breaking up their sentences by inserting the iconic Reagan in the middle of them, as in: "We need to - Reagan - cut taxes and reduce the - Reagan - size of government. Quite conveniently subliminal, don't you think?

I don't have the slightest idea where all of this will go. There are so many moving parts. But it is now quite apparent that the first targets are Republicans who are being challenged in the primaries, thus draining the GOP of some of its resources. I'm sure that the realpolitik of the Tea Party Revolution is frightful for such guys as Mitt Romney and other presidential hopefuls who are reduced to whispering about the arrival of Lady Gaga in their party.

She will have a voice, whether as a falling dwarf star or a supernova. Fox is expediting her claim to national prominence by installing a TV studio in her Alaskan home. Imagine that! A national news network fashioning the candidacy of its own choice.

This much I can say: Palin was garden variety loyal opposition compared to Tom Tancredo, a mess of a person who gave the most outrageous racist speech at a political gathering since the days of George Wallace. Still, since the Tea Party delegates were 99.44 pct. Ivory Soap pure, his words must have resonated with more than a few of them. And therein lies a bigger problem ahead for not only the Tea Party but also for the nation when such forces again become players.

Are you ready for some nightly Tea Partying?

IT HAS NOW COME down to this: the first national Tea Party Nation convention opens today down in Nashville, a volcanic event that will upstage the Super Bowl by three days. The world, it says here, will be watching. So will America's national media, looking for an opening here, a weathervane there, to define the nation's political future. Even the professional politicians on both sides of the aisle aren't quite sure what to make of the spectacle that would rival England's Peasant Rebellion. Probably more so, inasmuch as there were no TV cameras back in the 14th Century and Glenn Beck had yet to be even a gleam.

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But you're not likely to find any doubt for the cause among the starry conservative cast that will parade before the 600 registered attendees in the Opryland Ballroom to prescribe fail-safe solutions for all of the nation's problems. Indeed the only doubts that have prevailed are whether the organizers of the convention were less interested in telling off liberals , socialists, the New York Times and President Obama than in the profit motive at $549/per/ticket.

Although a couple of headliners, Reps. Michele Bachmann and Marsha Blackburn decided it might be more politically correct to back out of the event, the reports from Opryland is that all other systems are go, and then some, to satisfy the frustrations, anger, outrage, disillusionment, isolation and cynicism of the masses. Even the keynote speaker (Saturday night), Sarah Palin, once seemed uncommonly friendly to secession talk in Alaska before she revved up her personal ambitions in the McCain campaign and denied everything - even those times when she declared she didn't know what she didn't know.

We caught some of the tone of the celebration - which it is - by scanning the credentials of the other marquee speakers. For example, former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, a homophobe trying to rise from the ashes by running for governor this year. You may remember that the other justices unanimously kicked him out in 2003 after he disobeyed a federal court order against a monument for the Ten Commandments in the courthouse.

Others who may be expected to supply windpower to the Lipton teabags wiggling from the delegates' hats will be Steve Milloy, a Fox news commentator who rants against junk science , and Tom Tancredo, who sort-of ran for president the last time on an anti-immigration platform. God knows who will be lurking in the shadows.

But the only platform worth assessing is Palin's, a cutting-edge candidate for the White House who will be down there with her enablers taking names, email addresses and places of birth while profiling potentially useful allies to guarantee her claim to fame will last more than 15 minutes. On Sunday, the day after the convention, the Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saints will meet in the Super Bowl in Miami to determine who is really No. 1.