The Labor Day weekend marks the unofficial start of the presidential campaign season, and many of the leading candidates for the Republican nomination have started to take shots at each other, not just at President Obama, reports CBS News political correspondent Jan Crawford.
Several jabbed at Texas Gov. Rick Perry, perceived by many pundits as the latest frontrunner.
That list included former half-term governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin – who’s managing to keep speculation alive about whether she’s going to toss her hat into the GOP ring.
At a Tea Party rally in Indianola, Iowa, the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee took what Crawford says appeared to be a swipe at Perry, after reports suggesting he was cozy with big donors.
“Some GOP candidates,” Palin said, “they also raise mammoth amounts of cash and we need to ask them, too: What, if anything, do their donors expect in return from their investments?”
Most of the leading Republican contenders will be in South Carolina today at a political forum hosted by powerful, arch-conservative Sen. Jim DeMint.
And DeMint told “Early Show” co-anchor Jeff Glor he doesn’t think a Palin run is in the cards this time around.
“It doesn’t appear that she is,” going to get into the fray, DemInt said. “She’s done a lot, I think, to engage the American people and stir things up, which we really needed to do, to get American citizens more involved in the process. It made a big difference in the last election. My hope is it’ll make an even bigger difference in the next election, as people take back their government.”
According to a new poll from Fox News, 71% of the registered Republicans who were surveyed from Aug. 29 to Aug. 31 said Palin, the former half-term Alaska governor who was John McCain’s running mate in 2008, should sit out the 2012 race. Just 25 percent said they believe she should run.