The bus tour that stands to return her to the 2012 spotlight is taking her to the part of the country that’s the least friendly to her — the northeastern U.S.
It’s a part of the country she’s mostly avoided since 2008, conspicuously not setting foot in early presidential state New Hampshire at all during her two book tours and her 2010 tea party campaign swings. Now, however, with her luster dimmed and her national relevance in question, she has chosen to venture into the belly of the beast.
“There’s no doubt in my mind the northeast is the least favorable area of the country to Sarah Palin,” said Terry Madonna, a longtime Pennsylvania pollster and analyst who directs the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College. “But she has to show she can broaden her appeal. She can’t just go to where she’s already won voters.”
Nevertheless, it’s clear Palin is picking her spots carefully.
Though the tour begins Sunday in Washington, D.C. — home to the political establishment with which Palin has a well-documented relationship of mutual loathing — it’s at a motorcycle rally, the annual Rolling Thunder bikerfest that streams over the Memorial Bridge en route to the Vietnam Memorial.
In Maryland, where the candidate Palin endorsed in the 2010 GOP gubernatorial primary got less than a quarter of the vote, she’s going to the Civil War battle site of Antietam, in the rural western arm of the state — far from the coastal population centers of Annapolis and Baltimore.
In Pennsylvania, where America’s most famous hockey mom was booed in 2008 when she dropped the puck at a Philadelphia Flyers game, she’ll visit another small-town Civil War battlefield, Gettysburg. She’ll also make a return foray into Philadelphia — a stop at the Liberty Bell.
Palin is wrapping herself in American history, tapping into the hyper-patriotism that is her hallmark. Her destinations are historic islands, refuges amid the most urbanized and Democratic territory in the nation.
This is the way the itinerary is described on her political action committee’s website: “This Sunday, May 29th, Governor Palin and the SarahPAC team will begin a trip through our nation’s rich historical sites, starting from Washington, DC and going up through New England,” it states. “The ‘One Nation Tour’ is part of our new campaign to educate and energize Americans about our nation’s founding principles, in order to promote the Fundamental Restoration of America.”
Below that, there’s a donation button, and below that is a Google map of the U.S. — with no stops marked on it.
Palin’s plans, details of which are still hazy, will also take her to New Hampshire for the first time since she was on the GOP ticket with John McCain.
But after all her time away, Granite Staters aren’t feeling particularly warm about her.
A CNN/WMUR poll of New Hampshire Republican voters last week found Palin had the support of just 5 percent, good for fifth place and trailing non-candidate Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who has dipped his toe in the presidential waters of late
