Wasilla, Alaska

On the Fourth of July, a thousand people gathered on the banks of Lake Wasilla for a Tea Party, one of those anti-tax, pro-liberty bits of street theatre that have been springing up around the country. The day before, three miles away, Sarah Palin, in her characteristic tumble of words, had resigned. At the party, from the flatbed of a tractor-trailer, a string of speakers preached resistance to a crowd that came bearing the standard liberty accessories: Gadsden flags, holstered sidearms, signs reading “DON’T TAX ME BRO.”

In the middle of all this stood a thirty-eight-year-old middle-school teacher from Hudson, New York. Adrienne Ross, the media director and New York organizer for the 2012 Draft Sarah Committee, had been in Wasilla for only two days. But she said she had already “witnessed history,” had a salmon bake—using Palin’s recipe—with the Governor’s hairdresser and confidante Jessica Steele, and, just that morning, met Palin’s parents and joked around with Piper. It was like going to Sarah Palin fantasy camp, and, regardless of Palin’s next move, Ross said, “I am exactly where God wants me to be.”

Ross’s uncle is the New York Senate Majority Leader Malcolm A. Smith, and the rest of her family supported Barack Obama, but Ross fell for Palin during the Republican Convention. “It was an answer to my prayers, because I didn’t want to just vote against Barack Obama. With Palin, I was voting for someone.”

Other Palin pilgrims at the Tea Party shared Ross’s fervor, if not her grace. “You better not call her a quitter,” said Nyla van Brunt, who had come to Wasilla from Mesa, Arizona, along with Brenda Peterman, a fellow-retiree. “That’s right,” Peterman warned, eyes narrowing beneath her visor. “Don’t write anything stupid.”

This is the pro-Palin recipe: adore her, be angry for her, and, above all, defend her. It doesn’t matter that her intentions are sometimes known only to God and Todd, as they like to say here; those who are with her are staying loyal. Pundits pronounced her dead in the days following her resignation, but the following week her poll numbers among conservatives held steady or even rose. A USA Today/Gallup poll showed that seventy-two per cent of Republican voters would vote for her if she ran for President in 2012.

Holding a no-taxes sign in the face of oncoming traffic, Cecilia Pavek nodded toward her son and said, “If people were talking smack about my kids, I would have beat them down a long time ago.”

The local talk-show host Eddie Burke was there; many of his regular callers were also in the crowd. He pointed out that he was the Palin supporter whose face had been Photoshopped onto baby Trig’s head by a liberal blogger last month, provoking waves of outrage that Palin echoed in her resignation speech.

After a prayer by a local deacon (“Give us change you can believe in, Lord”), the rally’s organizer, Cheryl Brooks, gave a speech that hopped between passion and panic. Brooks, a soon-to-be great-grandmother (“The little booger won’t come out on time”), started her activism online, but the Anchorage Daily News and the Alaska Dispatch have blocked her IP address so that she can’t comment on their stories anymore. She said she was impatient with the social networking done by groups like Second Amendment Sisters (who co-sponsored the rally). “I was tired of the whining and the socializing,” she said. “They don’t do anything.” So she took to organizing.

State Representative Carl Gatto got off the stage and seemed pleased with his speech—both he and Wasilla’s mayor, Verne Rupright, offered a mixture of revolutionary history and contemporary populism in their talks. He said he thought that Palin’s vagueness had worked. “She could do anything for two months, and wait for the offers to roll in,” he said. “She’s got a book deal. She’s doing very well.” Gatto’s own book-in-progress, a memoir stretching from his childhood in New York City to his new life in Alaska, was not faring as well. “I’m writing it,” he lamented. “But nobody will buy it.”

“We’re out there because we love our country,” Brooks said after the rally. “We don’t want armed conflict. But we want the government to know that they have to listen to us.” For Palin, listening to them might just be the ticket back into government.