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Palin-Beck 2012?
"Not a chance," Glenn Beck told "Fox News Sunday," in a segment taped the morning after he wrapped up a Saturday political rally and religious revival meeting at the Lincoln Memorial he claims attracted 300,000 to 650,000 people.
In a far-ranging interview with Fox host Chris Wallace, the right-wing TV and radio personality distanced himself from his 2009 comments portraying President Barack Obama as a "racist" with an implacable hostility to white people - while attacking Obama for advocating a theology that favors the oppressed.
Beck shrugged when Wallace - who touted his "affection" for his fellow Fox star - asked Beck if the rally augured a 2012 political alliance with Palin, who headlined the event along with him.
"I don't know what Sarah's doing, [but] I have no desire to be president of the United States, zero desire," Beck said.
"I don't think that I would be electable."
But Beck didn't offer an early endorsement to Palin, either, saying: "I'd like to find [a presidential candidate] one with some honor and integrity, I haven't seen them yet, but they'll show up."
Beck's rally was a tea party-fueled phenomenon, a hybrid Christian revival meeting and conservative political rally, with the crowd stretching from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, past the reflecting pool, to the edge of the Washington Monument.
The National Park Service has a policy of refusing to make crowd estimates, although NBC put the number of people at 500,000.
"Look, we'll have aerial photography here shortly," Beck told Wallace. "But I can tell you it's in the hundreds of thousands, let's be on the low end -- 300,000 -- and it may be as high as 650,000."
But Beck's suggestion that divine providence played a role in scheduling - the rally took place on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a Dream Speech" - prompted a counter rally by the Rev. Al Sharpton.
"They want to disgrace this day," Sharpton told his much-smaller gathering.
Wallace pulled a Tim Russert go-to-the-videotape, contrasting Beck's high-toned religious rhetoric Saturday with his July 2009 statement on "Fox and Friends" that Obama harbored a "deep-seated hatred" for white people.
"It shouldn't have been said, it was poorly said, I have a big fat mouth sometimes and I say things ... and that's not the way people should behave and it was not accurate," Beck said, adding that what he picked up from Obama wasn't racism -- but a commitment to 'Liberation Theology,' a movement that stresses responsibility of religious people to help the poor and oppressed.
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