SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — As Sarah Palin delivered a weekend address here, paying tribute to Ronald Reagan on the centennial of his birth, she directed a forceful line of criticism at President Obama and his administration, though she did not mention the crisis in Egypt. But in a subsequent television interview, she took Mr. Obama to task for his handling of the matter.
“It’s a difficult situation,” Ms. Palin told the Christian Broadcasting Network. “This is that 3 a.m. White House phone call, and it seems for many of us trying to get that information from our leader in the White House, it seems that that call went right to the answering machine.”
The early-morning phone call that Ms. Palin mentioned was reprised from the 2008 Democratic presidential primary fight, when Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton aired a stinging television ad suggesting that Mr. Obama lacked foreign policy experience. To drive home the point, the commercial showed a telephone ringing — unanswered — in the middle of the night.
Three years later, Mrs. Clinton is deeply entwined in the diplomatic crisis in Egypt as Mr. Obama’s secretary of state. (These days, if there are any 3 a.m. phone calls, it probably means that the situation was elevated to the attention of the White House, where the telephone is answered around the clock.)
In an interview with David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network, Ms. Palin criticized the Obama administration for failing to explain “to the American public what they know.” In an excerpt of the interview released Saturday evening on the network’s Web site, Ms. Palin declared: “Now, more than ever, we need strength and sound mind there in the White House.”
This is a transcript, provided by the network, of Ms. Palin’s response to Mr. Brody’s question about how she believes the president has handled the situation in Egypt:
“And nobody yet has, nobody yet has explained to the American public what they know, and surely they know more than the rest of us know who it is who will be taking the place of Mubarak and no, not, not real enthused about what it is that that’s being done on a national level and from D.C. in regards to understanding all the situation there in Egypt. And, in these areas that are so volatile right now, because obviously it’s not just Egypt but the other countries too where we are seeing uprisings, we know that now more than ever, we need strength and sound mind there in the White House. We need to know what it is that America stands for so we know who it is that America will stand with. And, we do not have all that information yet.”
At her appearance here in Santa Barbara on Friday evening, Ms. Palin spoke for about 30 minutes and did not take questions from the audience or reporters.
She spoke exclusively to Mr. Brody in a 10-minute interview following the speech. Asked what she might do differently if she decided to run for president, Ms. Palin said: “I would continue on the same course of not really caring what other people say about me or worrying about the things that they make up, but having that thick skin and a still spine.”
