No Beck-Palin ticket in 2012, talk show host says

Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin won’t be teaming up on a presidential ticket in 2012, the talk show host said Sunday, after their combined star power drew thousands to the National Mall this weekend.

“Not a chance,” Beck said on “ Fox News Sunday,” on the network that broadcasts the radio and TV host’s popular daily show. “I have no desire to be president of the United States. Zero desire. I don’t think that I would be electable.”

He added: “And there are far too many people that are far smarter than me to be president.”

Palin, whose appearance with Beck on Saturday came nearly two years to the day after she was introduced as John McCain’s Republican running mate, told Politico in a brief interview that she and Beck “like what we’re doing now.” But Palin, who resigned after two years as Alaska’s governor, is widely presumed to have national political ambitions.

Estimates vary of the crowd size at Saturday’s “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial. A CBS News count based on aerial photography gave attendance as 87,000. Organizers said it was closer to 500,000, and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), chairwoman of the congressional Tea Party Caucus, said it approached 1 million.

Federal officials and the D.C. police do not make crowd estimates.

Beck stirred controversy with his choice of date and location for the rally, held on the 47th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Beck called it a coincidence and “divine providence.”

He continued to downplay the notion that Saturday’s demonstration had political intent. Still, he said, such a mass gathering spoke to the fact that Americans were concerned over the direction of the nation.

“You don’t get that many people to come to Washington and stand there and have that kind of a moment without signs, without any political messages, for no reason,” he said in the Fox interview. That’s “the first message” that politicians should get, he said. “People aren’t really happy with things.”

Beck also said he regretted but would not retract his statement from 2009 Obama had “a deep-seated hatred for white people.”

“It was poorly said. I have a big fat mouth sometimes and I say things, and that’s just not the way people should behave,” he said. “And it was not accurate.”

mmemoli@tribune.com