“This is not about Sarah Palin. This is not about any candidate. This is about us as a people. But we need a leader. There is no one who has the political courage and the vision of this woman.”- JP
“I believe that she will run,” he says. “I can’t see her sitting this election out.”Singleton says if Gov. Palin does not announce at the September 3 “Restoring America” TEA Party event in Indianola, Iowa, then she will do so soon after the rallly.
Palin, a former Alaska governor, is scheduled to address a tea-party rally on September 3 in south-central Iowa. Singleton is one of the forces behind the event, working with grassroots groups. “Labor Day will kick off the Republican campaign for the nomination,” he hints. “She is going to make a major, major speech.”
Since late last year, Singleton has crisscrossed the Hawkeye State, connecting a network of supporters at rubber-chicken dinners and Republican picnics. He has huddled with county GOP chairmen, spoken with a number of conservative state lawmakers, and assembled a close-knit team of pro-Palin activists.
All of Singleton’s efforts have been self-directed, with no official involvement from Palin’s political apparatus. Still, he says, “We have not been on a lark. But we are happy, delighted even, to have people think that.”
GOP presidential contenders, from Rick Perry to Mitt Romney, will be in for a shock when Palin makes her entry, he predicts. “When she gets in the race, I would not want to be the other candidates, who have shamelessly whispered to Iowa Republicans for months that she is not running,” he says. “There will probably be some defections.”
Singleton, a 57-year-old former software salesman, says he has already compiled an extensive e-mail list of Iowans ready to join her ranks. With the help of Michelle McCormick, his fellow Organize4Palin state coordinator, “we have laid the groundwork for her,” he says.
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Insiders continue to stress that a decision probably will not be announced before fall, but even they concede they may find out right before the rest of the world.Peter Singleton and his Iowa chapter of O4P are indeed on a mission. Their groundbreaking ground pounding in Iowa should serve as an inspiration to grassroots Palin supporters across the nation. Game on!
Palin has no paid staff on the ground in the crucial state, but that does not mean she doesn’t have people working on her behalf—quite the contrary. She has an army of volunteers, led by an attorney from California who has completely relocated to Iowa to organize for Palin.
Peter Singleton has fully committed himself to the task, even though he says he has never met Palin. Surprisingly, he didn’t even take the opportunity to meet her at the screening, although he helped the team of conservative filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon—who put up $1 million of his own money to make the film—organize invites for the post-screening barbecue. “She doesn’t need to talk to me to have my support,” he explained.
Singleton spends his days and nights going to county GOP meetings across the state and urging caucus-goers to support Palin…all before she has made up her mind, at least according to the former governor.
“I’ve got a mission. I want to see us elect the right leader. The stakes are incredibly high and I think she is our best candidate,” Singleton told The Daily Beast.
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The Telegraph's Toby Harnden has written an in depth profile piece on O4P's main man on the ground in Iowa, who says Gov. Palin will make a grassroots campaign for president in 2012:Speaking to me after the premiere of the film “The Undefeated” in Pella, Iowa, Peter Singleton, a California lawyer who has been assiduously courting Republicans across the state where the first contest of the 2012 election will be heard, said it was “unthinkable” she would remain on the sidelines.Too bad we can't clone Peter Singleton, but O4P can do the next best thing by sending as many of its key people to spend some time on the ground with him. If the other 49 state can be organized for Gov. Palin as well as Peter has accomplished in Iowa, she could indeed mount a 2012 grassroots campaign for the presidency “the likes of which you’ve never seen.”
“She’s the right person at this time,” he said. “If you look back at Churchill’s time, in 1938 Churchill was unelectable, in 1940 he was indispensable.
“I can’t see her sitting this one out,” he said. “The stakes are too high. It goes back to 1940. Can you see Churchill sitting it out? It’s unthinkable. Can you see George Washington in 1776 sitting it out? Unthinkable. He wanted to be back on his farm but they said we need you to be president of the republic.”
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It was Mr Singleton who telephoned Beth Hill, director of the Pella Opera House, last Thursday to ask her whether “The Undefeated”, a full-throated defence of Mrs Palin and her career, could be shown there. He then visited to look at the auditorium and put Stephen Bannon, the film’s director on the phone to speak to her.
“Peter came here and he found our town reflected Sarah Palin’s small town, conservative values,” she said. Mr Singleton was also instrumental in distributing the 332 tickets for the film as well as inviting 1,000 Iowans, including many key Republican leaders in the state, for a barbecue afterwards.
When I asked about his involvement, Mr Singleton said that he was an old friend of Mr Bannon and he had been just one of ” a bunch of people” who had helped set up the screening.
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"When it comes to Palin in Iowa, it's pretty much Peter Singleton," said Iowa Tea Party Director Ryan Rhodes. "The guy is everywhere."Singleton's mission seems to be to convince Iowans that Gov. Palin will get into the race, win the Iowa caucuses and capture the Republican nomination for president. He argues, as does his fellow Palin supporters, that the GOP's 2008 vice presidential candidate is the better suited than her potential GOP rivals to make Barack Obama a one-term president in 2012.
Crisscrossing the state in a series of rented cars, the 56-year-old Mr. Singleton has spent the better part of five months visiting obscure county GOP chairmen, befriending tea-party activists, buttonholing lawmakers in the lobby of the state Capitol, and amassing a database of potential Palin supporters. His base camp is the Days Inn in West Des Moines, where he washes his shirts in the sink.
Deepening the mystery: Mr. Singleton swears he has never met Ms. Palin and has no contact with her team. "I'm just a dedicated activist working on my own," he said.
Ms. Palin's aides concur, insisting that she hasn't met with Mr. Singleton and that he is in no way coordinating with her political-action committee.
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The tall, sleepy-eyed Silicon Valley lawyer and former Oracle salesman seems to have found his calling in Iowa's political byways. Until last year, he had never worked on a political campaign.
A Northern California native, he spent a decade as a small-time investor after leaving Oracle in the mid-1990s. He then got a law degree and clerked for a Nevada Supreme Court justice, at age 52.
He first traveled to Iowa in August with a map of the state, and one contact at a tea-party group. "I drove around to the big counties and went into the election offices to shake hands and meet people," he said.
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It's an unofficial grass-roots effort, he said, unaffiliated with Palin's political action committee, although Palin's PAC political director also has kept in touch with some supporters since last fall.- JP
Singleton's effort is aimed at making party contacts, similar to the early stages of an official caucus campaign, in the event Palin runs - and he assumes she will.
But it's not a draft movement, and not much of an organization at all.
"We all have a pretty good idea of who she is, what she stands for and where she's going," Singleton said in an interview. "So when you are factoring in what kind of organization she is going to have on the ground, when and if she announces, you have to account for the people that support the governor at the level I do, folks who are on the ground not only identifying supporters and potential supporters, but also talking with all sorts of people about the issues, values, and principles most important to them, and about what's at stake in the upcoming election."
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Singleton has talked with Iowa Tea Party Chairman Ryan Rhodes, an up-and-coming organizer in a movement that embraces Palin.
Singleton plans to meet with Black Hawk County Republican Party officials when he returns this month, and is making contacts with activists in northern and western Iowa, activists say.
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With Palin's star power, "I think she could get in later with a big impact as long as she has some people fanning the flames for her there," Murphy said. "Once you have some credibility, you've done a debate, and have some activists lined up, there's a lot of movement late. The thinking that it's all locked up is overrated."
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