There is a new front in the battle for America’s hearts and minds and both sides of the political spectrum are pitching their tents for the long haul. Facebook, the social networking behemoth, is now the site of much heated political debate.

Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin embraced the medium upon resigning from the governor’s office in August. Ms. Palin made quite the splash, utilizing her facebook page as a springboard to voice opposition to healthcare overhaul and other Democratic measures:

For several days in August, the national health care debate turned to focus on so-called “death panels,” in large part because of two widely-publicized Palin Facebook posts accusing Democratic authors of the House proposal of creating bureaucratic entities to decide end of life care.

The former Alaskan governor is playing catch-up to one other politician that effectively used social networking sites during the campaign trail. As of September, Ms. Palin had the second most Facebook and Twitter followers, trailing only President Barack Obama.

While Facebook played a large role in generating support for Obama the candidate, but Obama the president has focused much of his communication to the mainstream media. Obama’s healthcare pitch has centered on townhall meetings, a primetime address to congress and a record setting round of interviews on the Sunday morning talk circuit.

Palin, as Politico notes, has done just the opposite:

Her establishment of one of the most powerful social media brands in politics has coincided with her effort to all but drop off the mainstream media grid.Since her television news blitz shortly before resigning as governor, a chaotic period in which she was even interviewed wearing waders while fishing, Palin has not appeared on cable or network television. She has issued very few statements to the media and her press contacts have become markedly less responsive to press requests.

The Democratic National Committee has taken note of Palin’s massive facebook presence and is now engaged in trying to counter it. The Democrat’s are launching a new campaign to “call Sarah Palin out” for her position on healthcare. Party leaders composed a minute long youtube video dedicated to refuting what Palin has written on her facebook page.

Strategist Jen O’Malley Dillon sent out a letter describing in detail the party’s new-media strategy:

This week, we’re calling out Sarah Palin and taking to Facebook to debunk her lies on the very same pages she’s using to spread them…We’ve put together a short Facebook note cataloging just some of Sarah Palin’s many distortions and the facts that prove her wrong. But we need your help to “share” the note and make sure she doesn’t get away with her outrageous lies.

The battle between Palin and the DNC is the first major showdown that Facebook has seen; trust that it won’t be the last. The sites boasts the largest membership of all social-networking mediums; it was only a matter of time before political personalities used it to engage in political trench warfare. After all, even the most contentious of townhall meetings cannot accomodate the millions of political activists that support Ms. Palin and the DNC, respectively.