Seated on a carpeted hotel floor, dozens of female Republican undergrads lined up on Saturday morning for a chance to meet Sarah Palin.
“She’s an amazing inspiration,” Alyssa Richardson a senior from James Madison University gushed. “I’m very excited. I have her book right here.”
CPAC organizers, who are honoring Palin with their “Woman Of The Year” award, invited the college activists to join her for a luncheon in the hopes they might be appropriately inspired.
For some like, the aforementioned Richardson, it’s a chance to meet an icon. The JMU student is here with member’s of her college’s “Network of Enlightened Woman,” a conservative group that she says is especially psyched about Palin.
“We’re anti-radical feminist,” she said, describing the Network’s mission. “We don’t have this victim mentality and we embrace gender differences as a good thing.”
But the general sense from the college crowd I got from a few interviews was more curiosity and distant admiration than the kind of Palin-mania she’s been known to inspire from her most faithful fans. Several told me that, even if they were supporters themselves, she was rarely discussed as a relevant figure among their campus conservatives. Richardson, for example, said commentators like S.E. Cupp and Star Parker were the first names that came to mind when asked which conservative women had the biggest following among her group.
“I’m a fan of hers, but not for president or vice president,” Christina Weller, a Romney-supporting junior at Calvin College in Michigan, said. Her fellow classmates sounded even less impressed.
“I like her too,” one bespectacled Calvin junior said, “but she says stuff where I’m like ‘Really?’ Some of the things that come out of her mouth…”
Kristin Miller, a sophomore, summed up her interest in the event thusly: “It’s curiosity, free lunch, women in politics.” A tentative Romney supporter after watching his speech yesterday, Miller said she wouldn’t recommend putting Palin on another GOP ticket out of fear she would scare off undecided voters. Still, she added that “the media likes to make her look stupid, but I don’t she is.”
Shanae Brown, a junior at Ohio State, however was a big Palin supporter. She said she’d be glad to vote for her if she ever decided to run for national office again.
“I love her,” she said. “I love her stance on keeping religion a part of the country. Alaska Airlines wanted to stop giving out prayer cards to passengers this week, for example, and she sent a letter to the CEO asking him to keep it up.”
Also: “She shot a moose. That’s awesome.”
But Brown’s enthusiasm for Palin was largely an anomaly among Ohio State GOPers, she said. “She hasn’t proven herself to people,” she sighed.
At the very least, virtually everyone I talked to could agree that they were impressed with her ability to keep up her message amidst an endless barrage of mockery from her critics. While Kristin Miller, a senior at Concordia in Minnesota, said she “wasn’t disappointed” when Palin elected not to run in 2012, she appreciated that “she’s a pot stirrer who says what others are thinking.” And she still has warm memories of her selection as John McCain’s running mate in 2008.
“I didn’t know anything about her, we all thought it would be our governor, Tim Pawlenty,” she said. “Then my mom called and said ‘It’s this woman we never heard off — and she’s adorable!”
Palin’s CPAC speech is scheduled for 4:30 PM.
