Fired up!
Sarah Palin and Rick Perry draw a page from the Obama playbook
They came to trash President Obama, but organizers of the Super Bowl Sunday rally featuring Sarah Palin and Rick Perry weren't above borrowing a few pages from his playbook, according to a CultureMapper in the stands, who filed this exclusive report.
For starters, the venue was just the sort of place favored by the president when he was out on the campaign trail last year: A big high school sports arena. In this case, the Cy-Fair ISD's swell Richard Berry Entertainment Center (where a travelling production of Anniewill open Feb. 12).
As at Obama's rallies, audience members were invited to send a text message to the campaign (the better to allow those get-out-the-vote folks to harvest cell phone numbers). And guess what message the Perry campaign suggested for the text: "Fired Up."
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, no?
Compared to her red-meat speech at Saturday's Tea Party convention in Nashville, Palin's remarks seemed relatively tame, focusing on her friendship with Perry, an old pal from the days when she too was the governor of a big energy state. (The ex Alaska chief exec referred to Texas as her home's "little sister state.")
It was little sister state Gov. Perry who—to coin a phrase—really got the crowd fired up, laying into his Republican primary opponent, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, as "a creature of Washington."
"Who thinks the answer is less Washington and more Texas?" Perry asked to cheers and whoops.
Palin spoke for about 10 minutes, allowing everyone to get on the road well before Super Bowl kick off.
Irony alert: A technician at the Berry Center revealed that he and his colleagues spent much of the rally "making faces at Dan Patrick."
The radio talk jock and state senator was an opponent of the Berry Center, now heavily used for everything from rallies to concerts to high school grads, the technician told us. But Sunday afternoon, Patrick didn't mind sharing the stage with rocker Ted Nugent to warm up the crowd for Palin and Perry.
Nugent wore a camo cowboy hat and said he had spent the morning "in a Texas deer stand."