Sarah Palin Gives Disastrous Speech At Commercial Real Estate Conference, Calls Obama An "Opium" Addict This weekend, 2012 Presidential candidate Sarah Palin delivered a keynote address at the 2010 ICSC RECon conference, a retail real estate conference in Las Vegas.
Of course, whenever a conference has a speaker like this, the draw is the speaker's celebrity power, not their glints of insight about the actual topic at hand.
Still, you kind of expect the speaker to tailor their speech a little bit to the crowd.
Apparently in this case that didn't happen. Mainly she just delivered a stump speech.
According to Ian Ritter, she slammed Obama as an addict of other people's money -- OPM, which she pronounced "opium."
According to the Dirt Lawyer's Blog, her speech went over like a ton of bricks, owing to the fact that she didn't touch on real estate
Speaking of disappointment, let's talk about the keynote address from Sarah Palin. In short, it was a standard stump speech with a few superficial comments about shopping centers and retail real estate. It was awful and a borderline train wreck in my opinion. All Palin had to do was add in a paragraph about the pending disaster of carried interest and she would have not only won over the crowd but gotten significant fundraiser cash from the industry if she runs in 2012. As it stands, I do not know if she knows what carried interest is.
David Bodamer at TrafficCourt had basically the same reaction, expressing surprise at the lack of taxation talk.
There's no sign her star power is diminishing just yet, but if she wants to get serious about the business of raising money from industry groups, it sounds like she'll need to hone her message a little bit.