Maybe you already saw this piece. It came out on Wednesday. This is really good stuff from our friend Kevin DuJan … and it’s really weird because just today I was thinking … I wonder if the Guv has gone back and studied every detail about Hillary Clinton’s announcement and campaign and what she might have learned from that?

Well, Kevin has it laid out for us … The whole piece is great … Here are some snippets:

1. Wait as long as possible to enter the race so that she is not attacked as a front-runner out of the gate.

Hillary Clinton announced her presidential bid, officially, in February of 2007 … but everyone knew she was running much earlier than that. She held a big fundraiser for HillPAC in October of 2006, to coincide with her birthday, which was the unofficial kickoff of her campaign. The media thus had an enormous amount of time to strategize how it was going to attack, malign, berate, and brutalize her through the primaries…to hand the nomination, and presidency, to Obama instead.
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Governor Palin knows full well what the media and the establishtment combined to do to Hillary Clinton, so she ingeniously refused to let herself ever be called “the frontrunner” for the Republican nomination in 2012.

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When conservatives in particular run for office, they are always up against not just a Democrat and the media, but the Cocktail Party GOP establishment too.

It’s three-on-one from the get go, and Governor Palin is someone smart enough to try to even her own odds.

2. Allow other candidates to be called “unelectable”, amongst other media memes, so SHE can be the alternative.

With Governor Palin refusing to officially announce her presidential bid when the media would have wanted her to, she forced other candidates like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry to enter the fray, so they could be demolished by the media and deemed “unelectable” for various and sundry reasons.

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Governor Palin is watching while Bachmann’s being called every name in the book and the media’s lampooning her as a crazy person who is…wait for it…unelectable.

Governor Palin sees the media claiming Perry is…wait for it…unelectable because he’s too caustic, too combatative, and too “unelectably unpresidential”.

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Before she emerges as an official candidate either later this month or in early September, Governor Palin will have allowed the media to do as much damage as possible to her primary opponents while awaiting the perfect opportunity to make her own presence known.

3. Let the media vet — or, more apt, rip apart — competitors before revealing her true intentions.

This is the very heart of what sank Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, because the media refused to vet Obama, before or after he became the official Democrat nominee.

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Governor Palin has expertly avoided becoming the center and focus of all attention in the 2012 Republican nomination race, which is an impressive feat considering how much more interesting she is than any of her competitors.

By keeping her distance, Palin has forced the media to talk about Bachmann, Perry, and other 2012 hopefuls instead of just fixating nonstop coverage on Palin herself (which, truth be told, the media really wants to do).

This way, when Governor Palin actually does enter the race, she won’t have to do all the vetting and investigating of her opponents herself. She won’t be in Hillary’s situation where the media flat-out refuses to ever write a single word vetting an opponent, because all the attention was focused squarely on herself.

4. Take down the establishment elite before they even see her attacks coming.

If you saw “The Undefeated”, you know full well Governor Palin has a history of clobbering the Cocktail Party GOP establishment, which most certainly deserved to be clobbered. And then some.

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By not announcing a presidential bid, as she was clearly expected to do, Governor Palin prevented the Cocktail Party GOP establishment from doing to her what the DNC establishment elites did to Hillary Clinton. Palin knows the Cocktail Party wants Romney to be the man who loses to Obama in 2012, but she refuses to let the establishment give Obama a pass in 2012 like the one he was handed on a silver platter by McCain in 2008.

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5. Cultivate a network of individual, personal support on the ground BEFORE hiring the consulting teams and making the campaign official.

Most importantly of all, the biggest lesson Governor Palin learned from Hillary Clinton’s 2008 failings was to cultivate a campaign network that’s bottom-up instead of top-down.

Though social networking was still relatively new in 2008 (and iPhones were only released in the middle of the campaign), Hillary’s top-tier team really didn’t make any large-scale successful efforts to get regular, individuals engaged in the campaign in a substantive way.

There were a lot of big events, fundraisers, rallies, and the like, with the social networking used mainly to keep people informed of where they could go to stand and listen to Hillary speak in person, or maybe do some phonebanking.

The campaign was directed by consultants and various experts, many of them longtime Clinton confidants, who decided where and when things should happen and how everything should be run. Very little in terms of ideas or energy was ever really absorbed from on-the-ground supporters and carried to higher levels. Everyone in the big offices believed they knew best, since they elected Bill Clinton to office twice and saw this as merely their third time cooking with the old formula.

Governor Palin’s 2012 presidential campaign will be unlike anything that’s come before it, because the energy fueling it really comes from individual, average, Americans who are exicted to see her run for the presidency and are committed to doing everything they can do to help her.

I would add one more thing the Governor no doubt learned from Hillary … a long campaign with lots of high-priced consultants costs LOTS of money. Hillary is still soliciting donations to retire her debt. I’m certain Governor Palin will not make that mistake. Shorter campaign. More grassroots. No debt.