Palin kicks off two-week road trip of Tea Party Express rallies

The remark came as the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee — who has not publicly committed to seeking higher office — kicked off the 15-day Tea Party Express coast-to-coast campaign tour, hoping to capitalize on government discontent and unify conservatives before the Nov. 2 election.

Headlining a rally outside the county’s GOP headquarters, Palin told more than 500 people that common sense is an “endangered species’’ in Washington, D.C., and they should “keep the faith’’ when they vote on Election Day.

The former Alaska governor earlier endorsed Republican Sharron Angle, a Tea Party movement candidate locked in a tight race in Nevada against Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader.

“Tea Party Americans, you are winning, you are turning this country’s political landscape upside down . . . and the left just doesn’t know what to do with you,’’ Palin said to cheers.

In a moment of self-deprecation, Palin told the crowd, “I can see November from my house,’’ a reference to a comedy skit over her qualifications for vice president when she said she could see Russia from Alaska.

Then, looking to the next presidential election two years from now, Palin said, “Mr. Obama, and your czars, you’re next because we can see 2012 from our house.’’

The Tea Party Express tour was headed to Las Vegas today. It has scheduled stops in 15 states before it ends Nov. 1 in New Hampshire. — ASSOCIATED PRESS

It is not a rhetorical question. At Pig Pickin’ and Politickin’, a barbecue-fed rally organized here last week by a Republican women’s club, a half-dozen guests were asked by a reporter what had happened to their taxes since President Obama took office.

“Federal and state have both gone up,’’ said Bob Paratore, 59, from nearby Charlotte, echoing the comments of others.

After further prodding — including a reminder that a provision of the stimulus bill had cut taxes for 95 percent of working families by changing withholding rates — Paratore’s memory was jogged.

In a troubling sign for Democrats as they head into the midterm elections, their signature tax cut of the past two years, which decreased income taxes by up to $400 a year for individuals and $800 for married couples, has gone largely unnoticed.

Actually, the tax cut was, by design, difficult to notice. Faced with evidence that people were more likely to save than spend the tax rebate checks they received during the Bush administration, the Obama administration decided to take a different tack: It arranged for less tax money to be withheld from people’s paychecks.

They reasoned that people would be more likely to spend a small, recurring extra bit of money that they might not even notice, and that the quicker the money was spent, the faster it would cycle through the economy.

Economists are still measuring how stimulative the tax cut was. But the hard-to-notice part has succeeded wildly.

In a recent interview, Obama said that structuring the tax cuts so that a little more money showed up regularly in people’s paychecks “was the right thing to do economically, but politically it meant that nobody knew that they were getting a tax cut.’’ — NEW YORK TIMES