President 2012: Sarah Palin – “Game On?”

Either Sarah Palin is going to run for President or she will have a nice documentary she can show her great-grandchildren in a few years.

Shortly after Republicans swept last November to a historic victory in which Sarah Palin was credited with playing a central role, the former Alaska governor pulled aside her close aide, Rebecca Mansour, to discuss a hush-hush assignment: Reach out to conservative filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon with a request. Ask him if he would make a series of videos extolling Palin’s governorship and laying to rest lingering questions about her controversial decision to resign from office with a year-and-a-half left in her first term. It was this abdication, Palin knew, that had made her damaged goods in the eyes of some Republicans who once were eager to get behind her potential 2012 presidential campaign.

The response was more positive than Palin could have hoped for. He’d make a feature-length movie, Bannon told Mansour, and he insisted upon taking complete control and financing it himself — to the tune of $1 million.

The fruits of that initial conversation are now complete. The result is a two-hour-long, sweeping epic, a rough cut of which Bannon screened privately for Sarah and Todd Palin last Wednesday in Arizona, where Alaska’s most famous couple has been rumored to have purchased a new home. When it premieres in Iowa next month, the film is poised to serve as a galvanizing prelude to Palin’s prospective presidential campaign — an unconventional reintroduction to the nation that she and her political team have spent months eagerly anticipating, even as Beltway Republicans have largely concluded that she won’t run.

Read all of the rest.

With the Huckabee and Daniels withdrawal, I am going out on a limb and say Sarah Palin will most probably run for the GOP Presidential nomination. She has nothing to lose, except her Fox News gig and if the stories about her and Fox News’ Roger Ailes are correct, she is dead there after her three year contract expires anyway. She also saw what happened to Glenn Beck.

Yes, Sarah’s polling is not very good against President Obama. She is hoping this film and its narrative will help set the record straight. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.

Mitt Romney and the GOP Establishment (meaning the Bush family, Karl Rove et. al.) must be going nutsoid at the prospect of her candidacy. The donors will line up three or four abreast to pour money into either Romney or Huntsman. If they start to decline in the polls, head to head with Palin, Chris Christie will be called upon to run.

Sarah Palin is the only game changer in this race and as she has said, “Mr. President, game On.”