Sarah Palin, RNC darling in 2008, heads to Arizona this week

Four years ago, Sarah Palin was the belle of the RNC ball, outwardly confident, affecting and relatable. Her keynote speech as the presumptive vice presidential nominee roused the audience in St. Paul, Minn., heralding what seemed to be a natural addition to presidential candidate John McCain's campaign, dubbed the Straight Talk Express.

Indeed, some lines are impossible to forget:

On motherhood: "I love those hockey moms. You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick."

On her husband Todd: "Throw in his Yup'ik Eskimo ancestry, and it all makes for quite a package. And we met in high school. And two decades and five children later, he's still my guy."

This campaign, however, Palin didn't make the trip to the RNC. Er, the real Palin, that is.

Palin is campaigning in Arizona this week for Kirk Adams, who is running for the Republican nomination in the state's Fifth Congressional District race.

The New York Times reported Palin appeared at an Adams campaign stop in Gilbert, Ariz., Monday with Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman" playing over the speakers.

“This election, folks, is not just about replacing the party that’s in power. It’s about who and what we’ll replace it with,” she said.

While she's operating far from the real Republican action this week, it seems Palin harbours little ill will.

“I’m making sure to get out there around the country,” Palin told Fox News, “and sometimes supporting underdogs — those that are underfunded, underpresented in terms of name recognition and surrogates out there on the political scene — making sure that those that need to be put on the map — because their message is the right message and their intentions are right — are heard from.”

Former Saturday Night Live actress interrogates a man in tights

I was walking near the convention's security perimeter when I spotted a man in a superhero costume. This was strange. Then Victoria Jackson - flighty Saturday Night Live actress turned conspiratorial and flighty Tea Party activist - stumbled into our conversation, and things somehow got stranger. At the 45-second mark of this video, Jackson begins interrogating the costumed man, who is much more normal than her, about "communist" Barack Obama:

 

Here, Jackson explains to me why she thinks Obama is a communist - and why his father may not be his father:

 

The man's real name is Dale Pople, but he goes by Old Superhero. He's 44, a former pro wrestler now in broadcasting, and he just likes dressing up in tights and helping people. (Click here for an article about him.) Bonus: he is half-Canadian.

"My mom's from Whitby," he says. "It's a suburb of Toronto. In Ontario providence? Is that what it's called?"

Pople says he helped raise money to send a little boy to the Mayo Clinic and "kept a roof over a battered woman's head up in Seattle." He also helped replace the "armour" of a California "superhero."

"Other than that," he says, "I just go out, patrol around, and look for people to help." What kind of people? "Somebody in trouble, somebody fell down, somebody needs a hand, somebody's lost. Anything."

He likes Mitt Romney, though he preferred Rick Santorum in the Republican primary.