Palin Rallies the Tea Party Faithful

At a convention marked by extreme speeches and occasional conspiracy theories delivered from the podium, the question going into Saturday night's keynote finale from Sarah Palin was: How extreme would she get in order to ingratiate herself with her audience?

Click here for all of Jonathan Kay's posts from the Tea Party convention in Nashville.

At the National Tea Party convention in Nashville, the question going into Saturday night's keynote finale from Sarah Palin was: How extreme would she get in order to ingratiate herself with her audience?

The answer: She didn't budge an inch from the chipper, red-state messaging she's peddled since John McCain picked her as his VP nominee.

At a convention marked by extreme speeches and occasional conspiracy theories delivered from the podium, Palin did not take the bait. Her speech was by far the most moderate of the three-day convention, and nothing she said would have been out of place at a mainstream GOP event.

While Tea Party leaders here have been accusing Barack Obama of hatching evil plans for a "one world state," Palin didn't say anything more nasty than that Obama was a "charismatic guy with a teleprompter." She even gave Obama credit for sticking the course in Afghanistan, and plugging nuclear power in the State of the Union Speech -- something no one else dared say at this Obamaphobic convention.

Nor did she make any claim to leadership of the Tea Party movement. Indeed, at two points, she very clearly said the movement should retain its leaderless, ground-up structure.

Not that anything she said was particularly brilliant. The speech was a color-by-numbers affair that read like it was a paragraph-by-paragraph summary of a stack of Wall Street Journal editorials. Drill for more oil. Don't criminalize the war on terror. Lobbyists in Obama's White House. Nationalize the healthcare insurance market. Stand by Israel. Don't apologize for America. But she said it well, as she always does, and she threw in some nice shout-outs to Ronald Reagan (whose 99th birthday would have been today) and -- more surprisingly -- JFK and Goldwater. And, of course, there were the applause lines about her son in the infantry, and children with special needs.

There's clearly a cult of Palin at this Tea Party Convention: Everyone I talk to here speaks of her in reverential, almost religious, terms. And so she didn't have to go overboard to please the crowd. To her credit, she didn't.