Sarah Palin Delivers Incoherent Speech In Iowa After Floating Presidential Ambitions

by Chelsea ReganJanuary 26, 2015, 9:24 pmNews >

Sarah Palin, shortly after revealing she was seriously considering throwing her hat into the ring for the 2016 presidential election, delivered a speech that all but destroyed whatever shot she had at being a contender.

Sarah Palin’s Rambling Speech

Speaking at the Iowa Freedom Summit in Des Moines Saturday, Palin pulled out a number of folksy phrases in an effort to please to the Republican base and show herself as a firebrand in conservative politics. However, Palin’s message failed to establish a coherent message through its divisive one-liners.

“Screw the left and Hollywood!” Palin shouted, taking down critics of Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper. As for the media, Palin spat, “The press asks, ‘Can anyone stop Hillary?’ This is to forego a conclusion, right?”

Her rambling continued on through the speech, particularly in one lengthy passage:

“Things must change for our government. Look at it. It isn’t too big to fail. It’s too big to succeed. It’s too big to succeed, so we can afford no re-treads or nothing will change with the same people and same policies that got us into the status quo. Another Latin word, status quo, and it stands for, ‘Man, the middle-class every day Americans are really getting’ taken for a ride.’ That’s status quo, and GOP leaders – by the way – you know, the man can only ride ya when your back is bent. So strengthen it. Then the man can’t ride ya, America won’t be taken for a ride, because so much is at stake and we can’t afford politicians playing games like nothing more is at stake than, oh, maybe the next standing of theirs in the next election.”

While Palin was delivering the speech, members of the media watching it first hand and viewers catching it on TV were all taking to Twitter to comment on it.

I don’t say this lightly. This is the strangest speech I’ve ever seen Sarah Palin deliver.

— Scott Conroy (@RealClearScott) January 24, 2015

I cannot stress enough that this is *least amount of sense* I’ve heard Palin make. Not a Scott-Walker’s-charisma-level bar, either. — Ana Marie Cox (@anamariecox) January 24, 2015

I’ve heard hundreds of Palin speeches and this is easily in the Top 5 laziest and most frenetically incoherent.

— Jeb Lund (@Mobute) January 24, 2015

Palin: “This is to forego a conclusion.” lolwut — Charles Johnson (@Green_Footballs) January 24, 2015

Sarah Palin rambles incoherently for 10 mins before finally getting to an Obama-eats-dogs joke

— Jon Swaine (@jonswaine) January 24, 2015

On Morning Joe , Joe Scarborough, who’d long been a fan of the former governor of Alaska and vice presidential candidate, called her speech a “tragedy.”

“It’s a tragedy,” Scarborough said. “We all remember that night she spoke in 2008 at the convention. I will say, it remains one of the most electrifying performances I’ve seen in the last four or five conventions I’ve been to. Nobody expected her to do well. She delivered the lines well, hit it out of the park. We will let history decide how she gets from that point to this point.”

Mo Ellethee, the Democratic National Committee communications director, released a simple, two-word statement: “Thank you!”