For all the talk of Sarah Palin being a rube, just a backward waif from Wasilla, Alaska, few seem to appreciate that she, more than any other rumored 2012 Republican nominee, has mastered the cutting edge art of e-Campaigning simply by being herself and employing the very latest in e-Tech to great effect.
Granted, she currently has star power the others don't enjoy, but while Huckabee has a TV show, Romney and others stroll halfway down Olympus to write an oped for the Wall Street Journal once in a while, Palin is using a fan blog, Facebook and Twitter to feed and grow her significant influence across the Right on-line. And the fact is, she was doing it even before her best selling book and subsequent tour.
With little more than that, no hundred thousand dollar DC e-consultants in tow, Sarah Palin has made herself into Obama's chief antagonist from the Right. Talk about stripping away the media filter, or going over the media's heads? Every time Obama launches another new initiative, there is Sarah Palin on her Facebook page trying to knock it down.
Newt probably hasn't even gotten around to scheduling his latest Sunday news show appearance on some new Obama plan and Palin has already made her opposition known in straight-forward words almost before the New York Times can tell us how wonderful Obama's latest idea sure is.
But she's the alleged unqualified rube? I'm not so sure. I've observed Gingrich use Twitter to tweet what a grand time he's having over dinner with James Carville, much to the chagrin of the Republican base. Meanwhile, nearly every Palin tweet or Facebook post is targeted to speak to the very people reading there, giving them precisely what they want to read, or hear in promotional, or political terms.
The smartest people in the room tend to be early adapters. More than that, they tend to be those that master and successfully exploit the latest of the greatest, the newest of the new. Sarah Palin is the unchallenged, though not unopposed, champion in that regard on the Right for now.
It's going to take far more than the latest obsessed rant from Andrew Sullivan, or Keith Olbermann, to convince me Palin is someone who doesn't know what she's doing. And whatever it is she's doing, it seems to work and not cost her very much. Only a dumb, or out of step politician, or pundit would criticize that, let alone not acknowledge it as seems to be the case with the media and her opponents.
So, just who really are the rubes in all this? Given our New Media age, it certainly isn't looking like Sarah Palin is one.