Sarah Palin: TEA Party Movement Is "Beautiful"

In her interview with ABC's Barbara Walters, Sarah Palin said the same thing she told Oprah Winfrey -- that a 1012 run for president isn't on her radar screen. But then, as the Orlando Sentinel's "TV Guy" Hal Boedeker reports, she added...

[But] when you consider some of the ordinary turning into extraordinary events that have happened in my life, I am not one to predict what will happen in a few years," Palin said.

"My ambition if you will, my desire, is to help our country in whatever role that may be, and I cannot predict what that will be, what doors would be open in the year 2012," she said.

Will she play a major role? "If people will have me, I will," she said.

The former governor also said the position Team McCain took on the bailout was a mistake and praised the TEA Party movement:

"That very first bailout, yes. Now we have learned, too, it didn't fulfill the promises that were made by Congress, and by the White House, that bailing out these businesses that were 'too big to fail,' " Palin said. "That did not put our economy back on the right track. So we learn from our mistakes. The tea party movement, beautiful. It energizes our country. More power to these people who are showing up there."

The 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate also criticized President Obama's statements on health care reform:

Palin notes that the words "death panels" are not found "in any of those thousands of pages of different variations of the health-care bill." Yet Palin adds that the president is "incorrect, and he is disingenuous."

- JP