sarah palinSarah Palin is putting your money where her mouth is.

For the first time in the year and a half since the former vice presidential candidate started her political action committee, SarahPAC, she's raising serious money and spending it too.

Politico (via Newser) reports donations totalling $866,000 were tallied in the most recent Palin committee filing with the Federal Election Commission.

Palin's also had the first significant outlay of campaign funds, $742,000, in the same time period.

In the tradition of spending money to make money, that went largely into more fundraising, including her first direct mail campaign after a long time spent working social media to keep her costs low while retaining her presence in the press -- if not on the political stage.

Let's face it: We all knew this was coming.

When she parted ways with the McCain campaign, Palin vowed to be back in 2012. Even when she made the glaring mistake of abandoning her state, she said she was doing it because she wouldn't run for the governorship again ... but she didn't say she'd never run for anything.

Then there was the announcement that she'd love to take on Obama head to head in 2012 -- that was when the no-term former governor said the president is failing at his job because of his "lack of experience." 

But enough about pots and kettles. There are plenty who are counting on this.

Christian publisher Zondervan is about to release a Palin biography for kids (unauthorized) expounding on her virtues (and conveniently skipping over that whole pregnant teen daughter thing).

And the Tea Party movement, with its distrust even of traditional Republicans, has embraced Palin as the alpha of the wolf pack -- they won't let her be gunned down in her race for the White House anytime soon.

But judging by the numbers -- less than a third of Americans are Tea Party happy -- it looks like a lot of those direct mailers will end up in post office recycling bins around the country.

 

Image via david_shankbone/Flickr