As the keynote speaker of the Tea Party Con­ven­tion, Sarah Palin was poised to demon­strate that she’s a seri­ous player in the next pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. Instead, she looked bet­ter suited to be the next 9^th grade class president.

She gave an elo­quent speech. It was full of the rah-rah top­ics that the con­ven­tion atten­dees were look­ing for. It was filled with one lin­ers aimed at the Democ­rats and Pres­i­dent Obama. She even joked about Pres­i­dent Obama’s use of TelePrompTers to give his speeches.  The quip was received with great applause, but it illus­trated how unpre­pared she is to run the country.

Is it smart to draw atten­tion to your opposition’s use of a device for read­ing speeches when you con­stantly refer to your notes dur­ing your speech? Palin’s head was buried in the podium for a lot of the speech so she could remem­ber her next talk­ing point. If you are try­ing to dif­fer­en­ti­ate your­self from your com­pe­ti­tion, you shouldn’t have a sim­i­lar weak­ness as the one you are point­ing out – espe­cially when yours appears more amateurish.

After the speech, there was a Q&A ses­sion. Nor­mally, this is just a show. The ques­tions are given in advance so the speaker can pre­pare their answers. The key being pre­pare in advance. One of the ques­tions was about her pri­or­i­ties as pres­i­dent. Was Palin ready? Of course she was! She had the five points writ­ten on her hand. Are you seri­ous? You want to be con­sid­ered to be the Pres­i­dent of the United States and you can’t remem­ber your agenda when in office?  

Most peo­ple suf­fer anx­i­ety when hav­ing to speak in pub­lic. To over­come this fear, you need to prac­tice and be famil­iar with your top­ics. Prepa­ra­tion is the key and when you are being paid $100,000 for your appear­ance, you owe it to the orga­ni­za­tion to give them your best.  Is this her best? Are we to believe she will be bet­ter pre­pared three years from now?