(CNN) — Sarah Palin left them standing, cheering for more.
The former Republican vice presidential candidate and tea party favorite closed out the Conservative Political Action Conference as the final keynote speaker, energizing a big crowd to the point where it erupted into chants of “Run, Sarah Run!”
In a rabble-rousing speech on Saturday outside Washington, Palin hit the right-wing high notes — from the Benghazi terror attack and IRS targeting to the “War on Women” and political correctness.
She even took out a couple of copies of “Green Eggs and Ham” to honor another tea party darling, Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican who read from the Dr. Seuss classic during a filibuster over Obamacare and spending last fall.
But her version had a political spin on it.
“I do not like this Uncle Sam. I do not like his health care scam,” she began, to big applause. “I do not like these dirty crooks, or how they lie and cook the books. I do not like when Congress steals. I do not like their crony deals. I do not like this spying, man. I do not like ‘Oh yes we can.'”
“I do not like this kind of hope, and we won’t take it — nope, nope, nope,” she finished.
The big crowd, hanging on her every word, eventually erupted into chants of “Run, Sarah, Run!”
“I should. I didn’t get to run this morning. I was so busy, man,” she said to big laughs.
Palin has not said whether she will run for office again. In 2009, she resigned as Alaska’s governor a year and a half early in her first term.
She went on to offer high praise for some fellow Republicans, like Cruz, who finished a distant second to fellow senator and potential White House hopeful, Rand Paul, in this year’s CPAC presidential straw poll.
“Liberty needs a Congress on Cruz control,” she said.
“Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and Paul and Gowdy and Gosar and Gomer — we’ve got some good guys in there!” she said, although she did not offer an endorsement of any of the party’s possible 2016 contenders.
About half of CPAC attendees said they disliked Republicans in Congress, according to the conference’s straw poll — and Palin took up that mantle, criticizing “the GOP establishment” who, she said, want Republicans to “lay low” and watch the Democrats self-destruct.
“You do interrupt when they are in the process of destroying your country, and that’s what we’re gonna do in 2014,” she argued.
But her biggest target, as always, was President Barack Obama, arguing he has broken his promises and taken the country in the wrong direction. Luckily, she said, he’s almost out.
“The age of Obama is almost over — the end of an era. He is the lamest of lame ducks,” she said.
