On Facebook, Palin again hints at 2012 run

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin threw more fuel on the speculative fire by publishing a Facebook note focused on tackling national debt, saying that “real leaders” need to emerge to defeat President Barack Obama next fall.

The note — “The Sugar Daddy Has Run Out of Sugar, Now We Need New Leaders” — was published Saturday. Quoting and paraphrasing former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and author Earnest Hemingway, the former Governor and failed 2008 vice presidential candidate chastised Obama’s economic policies.

“We’ve been slowly going broke for years, but now it’s happening all at once as the world’s capital markets are demanding action from us, yet Obama assumes we’ll just go borrow another cup of sugar from some increasingly impatient neighbor,” Palin wrote in the note. “We cannot knock on anyone’s door anymore. And we don’t have any time to wait for Washington to start behaving responsibly.”

Palin also several times reiterated the need for “new leaders” or “real leaders,” though she did not specify if she was talking about herself or a candidate in the fray already.

However, Palin did not hold back talking about actions she took during her own governorship of Alaska.

“As governor, I made the largest veto cuts in my state’s history, and I didn’t make many friends doing it. But we will never recover, we will never get free of devastating debt, unless we make tough choices now,” the note said. “We don’t hear talk like this from leaders in D.C. or from those running for office because they say what they think we want to hear rather than what must be said.”

Palin has played coy about 2012 so far, and some political analysts have doubted a White House bid from her. Though daughter Bristol Palin — with whom Palin appeared at a Mall of America book-signing late last month — told Fox News her mother has made a decision about running for president, nothing has been announced. She has not made many trips to early states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and during a recent trip to Pella, Iowa, Palin spoke as though she may back a candidate rather than be a candidate.

Palin may be finished with the “will-she-or-won’t-she” games, since she indicated Saturday no strong candidates have entered the 2012 presidential race.

“We need real leaders who will put aside their own political self-interest to do what is right for the nation,” she ended the note. “And if they don’t emerge… well, America has a do-over in November 2012.”

Here entree into the race could complicate things for Rep. Michele Bachmann’s presidential candidacy, as the Minnesota Independent’s Jon Collins reported last week. Palin could wait until Thanksgiving, at the latest, to throw her hat in the ring, says University of Iowa political science professor and GOP activist Tim Hagle. The soft GOP field, he added, “gives that opportunity for someone who really has that star-power and pizzazz and charisma to scoop up a lot of these people.”

“Bachmann seems to have a lot of star-power — but not as much as Palin.”