With no teleprompter, Sarah Palin gets poetic

Sarah Palin was mid-speech at an Iowa Tea Party gathering this weekend, the Freedom Summit, when her teleprompter froze. Without her script, the former vice presidential candidate and bestselling author got ... poetic.

Palin was soon using long dramatic pauses, repeated phrases and ideas that were more lyrically than logically connected. There were strong, strange words about “the man” (“The man can only ride you when your back is bent”), Obamacare (“What will they do to stop causing our pain and start feeling it again”) and press coverage of Hillary Clinton (“to scare us off, to convince us that — a pantsuit can crush patriots”).

“Sarah Palin channels her inner slam poet,” wrote Nia-Malika Henderson at the Washington Post. Henderson took Palin’s words and arranged them, brilliantly, in their poetic form. Here’s an excerpt:

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 retreads

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, everyday Americans are really gettin’ taken for a ride.’

That’s status quo.

And GOP leaders,

by the way,

y’know,

The man can only ride ya when your back is bent.

So strengthen it....

Henderson called the poem “The Ballad of 2016.” Last week, during a press event when Palin was serving wild boar chili to the homeless, she said “of course” she is interested in the 2016 election.

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