I watched Sarah Palin’s speech to the Tea Party convention, and New York Times reporter Kate Zernike watched it, and we saw it differently. She wrote that the former Alaska governor “gave the Tea Party crowd exactly what they wanted to hear.”

I don’t think she did. She gave them some support-our-troops patriotism and some warnings about Obama’s spending and deficits, and they cheered and applauded her on those. And she made a vague reference to the Tenth Amendment. But none of it added up to much.

The 40-minute speech had its how-bout-that-Scott-Brown, and how’s that hopey-changey thing, etc., but these were warm-ups to a main course that never arrived. She said, “America is ready for another revolution!” But a revolution to do what? The 10th Amendment says, “All powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Following the 10th amendment would mean what?

Neocon blogger David Frum noted that Palin’s foreign policy segment was “pure party orthodoxy”—three cheers for America in the War on Terror, etc. That’s something Frum (a Canadian) believes in, and Palin believes in. But the Tea Party people are not very interested in overseas crusades. Their interest is domestic. Some of them may even be the modern equivalent of America Firsters--a view that does not fit with Republican Party orthodoxy. Wrote Frum, “Interesting -- no applause for sanctions on Iran. No applause for Palin’s speculations that democracies keep the peace.”

The New York Times reporter missed this.

What the Tea Party people needed to hear was that Palin understood them—and I’m not so sure she does, or that she convinced them she does. And when she noted that they were a group without a political leader, and said they should remain that way—what did that mean? I took it to mean, “Don’t expect me to be your leader.”