Sarah Palin way out front in the "Facebook primary"

As we noted Friday, Sarah Palin's Facebook page is racking up new supporters at an astounding rate. According to techPresident.com, the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate has added about the same number of new supporters in the last week as Mitt Romney and Bobby Jindal each have in total. 

Common Sense 2020 looked at the numbers:

"Sarah Palin’s Facebook page has gained more than 300,000 new supporters in the last two months. She gained over 100,000 of these in the last week. As of this writing, she has over 800,000 supporters."

The Palin decision to use Facebook as a megaphone makes sense. When faced with a hostile legacy media which is in the tank for the opposition and insists on putting negative spin on every mention of your name, you have to go around it. When there is an army of websites on the nutroots left viciously attacking you 24/7/365, you need a medium which will allow you to control your message. In Facebook, Sarah Palin appears to have found it.

InsideFacebook.com points out that the former Alaska governor's message has a reach which extends well beyond just the social networking community:

In her critical post on the current debates involving the future of healthcare, Palin struck a nerve by accusing President Obama of creating a system that would involve "death panels." The phrase quickly caught on with people on both sides of the argument, and the White House even responded to the post through their own online avenues.

She has used Facebook in recent days to comment on other issues including energy security and cap and trade, and in past months to state her positions on national missile defense and the president's federal stimulus program.

To put things in proper perspective, not all of those following her on Facebook are supporters, and President Obama has many more people listed as supporters on his Facebook page than does Palin. But he was the beneficiary of a well-financed and carefully-planned new media strategy, while the former governor is using just a laptop and an internet connection to make her points and a search engine for basic research to back them up. It is also apparent that the president has lost much of the momentum he had behind him while building his huge Facebook army, and he is currently struggling with the challenges of actually governing instead of just campaigning. Though he still appears to be in campaign mode, much of the enthusiasm of Obama's supporters has dissipated.

One of Sarah Palin's earlier uses of Facebook was as a vehicle to announce the dismissal of some of the politically-motivated bogus ethics complaints her opponents in Alaska had filed against her. Ironically, these same anti-Palin forces, by clogging up the machinery of the executive branch of Alaska's government, helped to convince Palin to resign her position. Democrat strategists in the nation's capitol may come to regret using their Alaskan operatives in such a manner that helped to liberate Sarah Palin. They had her confined to a location far away from the national debate and occupied with the business of running a state government. No longer.

Now the former governor, free of the constraints of that office, is flexing her political muscles and making her presence felt in the national political arena in ways never imagined when she returned to the governors office after nine weeks on the campaign trail stumping for John McCain. It will be fascinating to watch Sarah Palin as she fine tunes her use of Facebook for policy statements and resumes using Twitter as a more personal means of staying connected with her base.

Related: As we also reported Friday, Hillbuzz believes:

"Sarah Palin is almost single-handedly bringing down Obamacare using only Facebook."

- JP