Today, I did something which went against the deepest instincts of my time at the Harvard Political Review: reporting. I heard two days ago that Sarah Palin was going to be in town for the Boston Tea Party rally, and I knew this was something that I simply had to see. So this morning I woke up bright and early, tried to comb my hair like a conservative would, and set off via godless socialistic public transportation to see some freedom.
It was awesome. It was everything I thought about the Tea Party and more. There were Birthers. There were signs calling for state nullification. I think signs calling for “Civil War 2012” were trolling, but who knows. I’m pretty sure the “MIT Nukular Engineers for Palin!!!1!” were trolling. The guy dressed as Hitler rocking an Obama armband? Not trolling, he was very real and had a beautiful mustache. Which was not real. It was very evident who the Tea Partiers were, namely old white people wearing American flag apparel. This being Boston, however, roughly a quarter of the attendees were liberals like myself who had just come to check out the scene; or to troll. My favorite was the dirty hippie carrying a massive sign saying “Fake America Welcomes You, Sarah”. He was chill.
The speech itself was nothing more or less than I expected. She didn’t do the usual pandering to the crowd by giving local flavor; I somehow doubt anyone would really believe Sarah Palin saying how much she loved Boston. But of course she invoked the actual Boston Tea Party and taxation without representation. The applause lines were more or less standard boilerplate (I didn’t have a notebook, so these might be slightly off): “We know how liberals love to say “Yes, we can.” But just because you can doesn’t mean you should. This November, the American people will tell you “No, you don’t”. She dissed the “lame-stream media”. And of course, she got a chant going of “Drill, baby, drill”. Having seen her say it in action, both me and my companion agreed it was highly sexual, and on purpose. The first thing her follow-up speaker said was “Conservative women; they’re smarter than you and way hotter than you!”
I was actually expecting more whining about the media and about how they hate on her, she managed to keep her speech more or less on-target and tossed out a lot of red meat. There was a lot of God stuff, which actually sounded something of a dissonant note. I didn’t see a single sign out there with religious overtones, they were pretty much universally about spending and debt and so forth. She also obviously didn’t articulate any sort of positive platform (other than “We should use the rich energy resources God has given us”), but devoted her speech mainly to harshing on the President. Her lines that weren’t about how awful liberals were all concerned how awesome America is, and about how God has chosen us to be a shining city on a hill, etc. There really was a lot of God stuff; even if it’s not the Tea Party tune exactly, that’s kind of her brand (and likely also something she really believes). Scott Brown was not mentioned, having recently turned down an invite to speak at the event. The crowd ate it up, even the long-stale lines about government being the problem (not the solution). And when Sarah’s speech was done, hordes of flag-wearing seniors swarmed back across the Common to Park Street station to enjoy the benefits of subsidized mass transit from the People’s Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
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