McClatchy Washington Bureau

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News flash: Sarah Palin was in town Monday.

You didn’t know that? I didn’t know it until the next day. Turns out, nobody knew it.

Not the police. Not GOP insiders. Not the high-dollar money folks. Not the Vitae Foundation that brought her to Kansas City last September. Nobody.

“Holy cow!” said Annie Presley, a fundraising consultant. “How did we not know about that?”

Because the Palin crowd never whispered a word about her plans — and they still won’t talk. Does that strike you as a little too mysterious for a woman eyeballing a White House run?

“Mysterious” goes a long way with Palin these days. I did see her off in the distance eight days ago at the Iowa State Fair, where she was coyly stating — for the umpteenth time — that she wasn’t a candidate for president, although she hadn’t ruled it out.

Not a candidate. Not running. But flirting, flirting, flirting with the crowds and reporters and the idea of it all. And she did all this while a huge crowd of fairgoers was lining up to see Michele Bachmann, who is supplanting Palin as this cycle’s GOP sensation.

Still, lots of media time and handshakes in Iowa. But nothing here in Kansas City.

It’s a mystery all right.

My source on her Monday appearance here is none other than Palin herself. She wrote on her SarahPAC Facebook page — that’s her big political action committee — that she spent a “very moving day” in Kansas City, “where it’s easy to remember what really matters, because here we have the National World War I Museum.”

Palin wrote that she stood in the rain reading many of the memorial inscriptions that proved to be a “somber and humbling reminder of the sacrifices young Americans made nearly a century ago.”

To read the complete column, visit www.kansascity.com.