UPDATED: Palin In Iowa Says, 'All Aboard Obama's Bullet Train To Bankruptcy'

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin arrived in Iowa, surprised her supporters at dinner, flirted with saying yes and even got wet with them, but at the end of the evening she declined to go all the way.

Declining to announce any plans for a presidential run, Palin instead took the stage at a soggy Tea Party rally in Indianola and bashed the president, big business and even members of her own party for their inaction.

As about 1,500 people listened on a grassy field muddied by pouring rain before Palin spoke, she warned that fighting for what's right can be tough.

"The road ahead is not easy," Palin said as American flags whipped in the wind and a gaggle of television cameras recorded her words. 

"You'll be demonized," she warned. "They'll make things up about you. They'll tell you to go to hell."

But, she told the crowd, there was no reason to respond with similar words because, "we know that we have time-tested truth and logic on our side, so we win."

Palin has sown seeds of speculation that she would run, recently releasing a video of her in Iowa that looked suspiciously like a campaign commercial. Featuring her touring the Iowa State Fair interspersed with scenes of supporters singing her praise, the video was played on giant screens prior to her Indianola speech.

She arrived in Iowa on Friday, surprising a later dinner crowd at the Machine Shed restaurant in Urbandale.

“I’m happy with the field of candidates,” Palin said at the restaurant, according to The New York Times. “I think that there’s room for more,though, because a spirited debate and more competition will allow for an even better discourse and a more rigorous discourse that the public deserves.”

But at the Tea Party rally, she said nothing of her plans except to try to make Barack Obama a one-term president.

"The president wants to win the future by investing your hard-earned money in hair-brained ideas like solar panels and really fast trains," Palin told the crowd. "He is saying, "All aboard Obama's bullet train to bankruptcy."

Palin spoke for about 40 minutes.

The rain arrived at the start of the event. The crowd, which organizers had predicted would number in the thousands, stood at about 1,500 when she spoke.

Huddled into a depression on a hillside in the National Balloon Classic  field near Indianola, the crowd stood soaking as a local conservative radio host and other speakers took to a stage, Palin’s red, white and blue “Restoring America” bus parked in the background.

Gatherers huddled under umbrellas. One woman sat in a chair with a sign that said, "homemaker/terrorist," in reference to rhetoric that associates Tea Partiers with terrorists.

Tony Nizzi, 20, of Waukee, was among those on the hillside. Nizzi said he wishes Palin would get into the race, but he understands why she is waiting.

"I think I am 50-50 on whether she will run. I really don't know whether she will get in or not. Even if she doesn't, she is still building power and she will be a force in the election," Nizzi said.

Palin had more than rain to contend with for her Iowa event.

Earlier in the week, news reports quoted her staff saying the event was “on hold” because of disputes with the Tea Party planners. In an interview with Patch.com, the president of the group said if Palin wouldn’t show he’d invited Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

After taking darts on Twitter and the Blogosphere, Palin’s campaign announced that she would, indeed, appear at the Indianola event. 

So far this year, Palin has gotten more attention than support. A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll released early this year showed her favorability ratings dipping to an all-time low of 38 percent, and subsequent polling hasn’t been much kinder to her.

Last week, a Patch-Huffington Post survey in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina showed that influential Republicans in those states overwhelmingly prefer that she not run for president in 2012. Only 8 percent of those surveyed offered Palin when asked who else they would like to see run for the GOP nomination.

And this week, only 15 percent of those surveyed said they thought Palin should run.