Fresh from the rumor mill: if Sarah Palin runs for president, she will base her campaign out of Scottsdale, continuing the Palin family's invasion of Arizona.
As you know, Palin's daughter Bristol recently/inexplicably bought a home in Maricopa. Then a job as an on-air personality at a local radio station just fell from the sky right into her lap. Her mother, it seems, is hoping for similar luck in the Grand Canyon State.
Palin hasn't announced whether she'll take a stab at running for president, and early polling numbers suggest she wouldn't exactly be a shoo-in for the GOP nomination. She's also been criticized for not doing a whole lot to reverse her recent unpopularity, or to take the appropriate steps to mount a run for nation's highest office.
But Politico's Ben Smith says Palin is taking the initial steps to run, which includes choosing Scottsdale as her home-base.
From Smith's column:
But I'm told Palin's camp is, at least, holding preliminary talks about how a campaign would look if she decides to run. One early decision, a source says: It would be based in Scottsdale, Arizona, where Bristol Palin recently bought a house in nearby Maricopa.
Smith cites the difficulties Palin would have basing a presidential campaign out of Alaska as one of the reasons she would base her hypothetical campaign somewhere a little closer to the equator. He notes "from a distant political culture to a daunting time difference, Palin hasn't been terribly well served by the fact that her state is little-known to reporters in the lower 48, and that email inquiries arrive at 3:00 a.m. needing answers by 5:00 a.m."
The difficulties of running a political campaign out of Alaska aside, Arizona seems like the prime spot for the darling of the Conservative movement to call home-base for a presidential run. The state is the Mecca of Conservative kookdom, so we have a feeling the former vice-presidential candidate would fit right in, should she choose to set up shop in Scottsdale, that is.
See Smith's article here.
