"Was that intentional?" I ask. What only can be described as a wry smile comes across Bannon's face. "'Dog whistles.' I like that," he says.

"It's highly structured and very thought through," he offers, then uses the word "sub-textual." He says there's a sub-texual understanding with those slogans.

He says he made the film for me. He didn't make the film for what he calls "Palinistas." He made it for people who don't know that she is, according to Bannon, a woman of accomplishment. Yes, he believes the problem with the former governor of Alaska -- the nearly three year object of the national media's obsession and author of two books about her life -- is that we don't know her. And for Bannon, to know her is to love her.

At the 9:30 pm screening Friday at the RightOnline conference in Minneapolis, he told the less than two-thirds full room that we were viewing the "unrated version." He said he'll have to do another cut to avoid an NC-17 rating. Spoiler: in the beginning of the film there's a picture of someone with a T-shirt with Palin's name and the word cunt. Other than that, the film was pretty G-rated. Or if we're being candid -- it's GOP-rated.

The themes and images are designed to make Republican-minded people react. There's an entire (estimated) 15-minutes of the film devoted just to re-capping Palin's 2008 Republican National Convention speech, along with reactions from her staunchest supporters (others of whom are interspersed throughout). The RightOnline crowd got fired up at the screening just like they did at the RNC the first time when Palin spoke of people in small towns: "They are the ones who do some of the hardest work in America who grow our food, run our factories and fight our wars. They love their country, in good times and bad, and they're always proud of America. I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town."

And also when Barack Obama appeared in the documentary, making this April 2009 statement, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." That was, as Bannon would put it, "very thought through." And effective. Someone in the screening shouted, "Terrorist!" at the images of the president of the United States during this scene.

"I don't believe that. I'm not calling you a liar, but that didn't happen," says Bannon, told about the comment. It happened. I was sitting just two tables down from the shouter. "Did anyone say anything to him when he said it?" Bannon asks. I was too far away to see, I tell him. He later says that he is disappointed by that report. He says he doesn't feel that way about the president, who he says made the right decision on taking out Osama bin Laden.

Bannon keeps on insisting he made this film for me. And I keep asking him what his goal was. "I want to drive a stake into the heart of 'Caribou Barbie,'" he says. He wants to paint a picture of Palin as a frontier woman who, as he put it, "is Wal-Mart nation."