In new ad, Palin calls the tea party ‘the future of politics’

For months, Sarah Palin has been coy about any plans to run for the White House in 2012, but it's getting increasingly hard to believe she's not positioning herself to be a candidate.

Over the weekend, she delivered a high-profile speech before Republicans in Iowa, a key presidential primary state. And now on Tuesday, SarahPAC, her political action committee, has come out with a new ad billed as a spot endorsing the tea party movement -- but really, it's all about cementing Palin as the leader of the movement.

The video, which runs a tight 80 seconds, shows images of Palin giving speeches to large tea party rallies like a Nevada gathering in March. The audio includes excerpts from a speech Palin delivered at the National Tea Party Convention in February, in which she proclaimed that the movement is "the future of politics."

"The Tea Party movement is not a top-down operation. It's a ground-up call to action that is forcing both parties to change the way they're doing business, and that's beautiful," Palin says in the ad, amid images of cheering crowds and waving American flags. She praises the tea party as a movement with "real people, not politicos, not inside-the-Beltway professionals," willing to speak out for "common-sense conservative principles."

You can watch the ad here: