SARAH PALIN HAS ADMITTED she is considering a run for the Presidency of the United States in 2012 – and says she is still trying to decide with her family whether she should seek election.

Palin – who was running mate to John McCain when he was defeated by Barack Obama in November 2008 – told the New York Times she was engaged “in the internal deliberations candidly, and having that discussion with my family, because my family is the most important consideration here”.

She added that a decision on whether to run would also involve deciding whether she could offer properties that other Republican frontrunners couldn’t, admitting that from a policy perspective, she would differ little from them.

“I know that a hurdle I would have to cross, that some other potential candidates wouldn’t have to cross right out of the chute, is proving my record,” she candidly added.

“That’s the most frustrating thing for me… it’s been much more perplexing to me than where the lamestream [sic] media has wanted to go about my personal life. And other candidates haven’t faced these criticisms the way I have.”

Whether the focus on her personal life will have eased in light of her appearance in a new fly-on-the-wall reality TV series, ‘Sarah Palin’s Alaska’, remains to be seen; it is believed that many within the Republican fold believe her transformation from public representative to pseudo-celebrity has dented her prospects.

Some of her unique abilities could include the ability to raise enough cash to bring a meaningful fight against Obama; the president raised a record $778m in his 2008 campaign, and though Palin’s fundraising for the mid-term elections was not nearly of the same scale, Bloomberg notes she raised $10m for Republican candidates in the elections which saw Obama’s Democratic majority in the House of Representatives demolished.