Opinion: Sarah Palin does Searchlight, Nev.; Al Gore settles for Strip
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Mark your calendars for March 27, when former VP contender – and Marmot Day advocate – Sarah Palin is slated to rally Tea Party followers in Harry Reid’s rural Nevada hometown of Searchlight.
(Al Gore, who less memorably held the VP slot for eight years, is doing something that day, too. Oddly, it did not merit a much-read story on the Washington Post website.)
Palin, if she takes the embattled Senate Majority Leader’s advice, will order the famous 10-cent cup of coffee at the Searchlight Nugget – and say hi to Verlie, for Reid, the object of much Republican scorn.
(That night, Gore is scheduled to wax politically poetic at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Las Vegas, about 60 miles north of Searchlight. Hopefully he brings the pie charts!)
Palin might see Searchlight’s highlights which include, according to a magazine profile of Reid, trailer-lined streets, the scattered tombstones of the Searchlight Cemetery and a ridge that Reid pointed to and exclaimed: “This used to be a whorehouse!” No Saks Fifth Avenue, though. Or Neiman Marcus.
(Gore might wander the Strip and be accosted by handbillers wielding cards of topless women.)
If history serves, Palin might also say something outrageous and possibly inaccurate – death panels, anyone?– but the tea party-goers will nonetheless cheer the Alaska governor-turned-authoress who’s become one of the movement’s standard-bearers.
(Gore will probably say something sensible and cerebral, in keeping with his stature as a Nobel Prize winner. It will be delivered in a monotone with minimal facial expressions. Now, about his usual speaking fee.)
Hmm. Wondering which of them has a better chance of making headlines.
-- Ashley Powers
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