The McCain-Palin Schism
A lot of rumblings about it this weekend, and Marc Ambinder’s blog in particular has been fascinating not so much for what he’s posting, but for the reading between the lines that you can do (as an embed, he basically has to make sure he doesn’t fall into a black list, so he has to be a little coy about what he can say). Nevertheless, it appears to be real, judging from the amount of “anonymous insiders” who are apparently coming out of the woodwork to start the backbiting. It’s quickly becoming reminiscent of the last months of the Clinton campaign during the Wolfson-Penn, only there’s still 10 days to go in the race, and, of course, it’s not between campaign insiders, but the two candidates heading the ticket and their respective staffs.
Ambinder, who has bent over backwards to let the senior McCain staffers speak to his reporting on record, nevertheless can’t help but title his latest post “McXplosion”.
Says one Palin source:
“The campaign as a whole bought completely into what the Washington media said — that she’s completely inexperienced,” said a close Palin ally outside the campaign who speaks regularly to the candidate. “Her strategy was to be trustworthy and a team player during the convention and thereafter, but she felt completely mismanaged and mishandled and ill advised,” the person said. “Recently, she’s gone from relying on McCain advisers who were assigned to her to relying on her own instincts.”
Says another:
“She’s lost confidence in most of the people on the plane,” said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to “go rogue” in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.
“I think she’d like to go more rogue,” he said.
Says someone loyal to McCain:
A second McCain source tells CNN she appears to now be looking out for herself more than the McCain campaign.
“She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone,” said this McCain adviser, “she does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else. Also she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: divas trust only unto themselves as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom.”
And so on.
Bad juju all around, it sounds like. The campaign is doing an okay job keeping a lid on it, and undoubtedly campaign trail reporters are salivating over the story, but still, it’s become at least somewhat clear that Palin and her people are looking to 2012, and McCain and his people are already grousing over 2008.
Leader of the party? Gimme a break. The day after the election, they will crate her up and store her right next to the Ark in the bowels of the warehouse.
Besides the 2008 also-rans, besides all the bitter senators who will have no desire to stay after the pending debacle, there is also the pesky problem of Bobby Jindal. Palin offers the redneck base nothing, absolutely nothing, that Jindal doesn’t also offer — except the two-digit IQ, of course.
Comment by KipEsquire — 10/25/2008 @ 9:19 pm
Well, it’s Huckabee that’s going to beat her out for that particular niche. Jindal maybe. But yeah, it’s three people fighting for a more-smoke-than-fire wing of the GOP, and Palin looks to be about third.
I peg her for a daytime talk show or a conservative radio program.
Comment by Brad — 10/25/2008 @ 9:43 pm
I hope you guys are right, but Palin does “send little starbursts through the screen” for a certain breed of conservative male. Let’s see Jindal top that. That’s part of the reason so many females find her repulsive, I think.
Comment by tessellated — 10/25/2008 @ 10:51 pm
The theocon wing of the party is going to need some time to digest what has just happened to them.
However, once they do, they are going to see who really respects their interests and who is using them. Maybe they can just rewatch their Obsession DVDs to figure it out.
Comment by daveg — 10/26/2008 @ 1:44 am
She was certainly mishandled by the campaign, particularly with keeping her from the press and then setting up a few super-important gotcha interviews. I’m not sure that this friction is exceptional, though, in general.
Comment by Adam — 10/26/2008 @ 12:17 pm
What made those interviews “gotcha” interviews?
Comment by tessellated — 10/26/2008 @ 12:39 pm
They were interviews full of gotchas is what I mean, which was inevitable once they were made so important and once the delay in her giving interviews had given the strong appearance that she didn’t know anything.
Comment by Adam — 10/26/2008 @ 12:59 pm
What “gotchas” are you referring to? I didn’t watch the Gibson interview, but the Couric interview questions I saw her fumble were not surprise questions. They seemed rather obvious to me.
Comment by tessellated — 10/26/2008 @ 2:08 pm
The questions were aimed, I thought, at exposing her ignorance. Which isn’t foul ball — I’ve not implied that — but it seemed to me that there was a definite incentive to try to do that. Interviewers wouldn’t try to do that to an unambiguously knowledgeable candidate, but then, why would they?
That was what I was talking about, anyhow. With those interviews being set up the way that they were, and reported on the way that they were (which is a consequence of their being so few interviews, early on), she was being set up to expose her weaknesses and not apply her strengths, which was an act performaned by, and a mistake from, the McCain campaign management.
Comment by Adam — 10/26/2008 @ 10:52 pm
Eh, again, I didn’t see the Gibson interview but the questions asked by Couric were fairly softball questions (e.g. “What do you read?” — c’mon it doesn’t get much easier than that!) or very predictable (e.g. Russian border question where she was given the opportunity to clarify an earlier gaffe). Couric didn’t spring anything on her that a candidate seeking the office of VP shouldn’t handle. If asking the expected is gotcha, then what the hell *isn’t*? Her ignorance was exposed mostly by the follow up questions when she was forced to actually respond to the original question or risk parroting her talking points like a mindless idiot. She chose the latter strategy.
Comment by tessellated — 10/27/2008 @ 2:54 am
It seems to me that Palin, because of the perception that she doesn’t know enough stuff, gets more questions trying to find out if she knows stuff (as did Bush in 1999). The Gibson ‘Bush Doctrine’ question was either designed to be a tripper-up or was bizarrely put-together (given that Gibson himself appeared not to be certain exactly what the ‘Bush Doctrine’ was, which he couldn’t be because it means a bunch of stuff) and Palin’s reaction (’crap, am I supposed to know this?’ rather than ‘What the Hell does Gibson mean by that?’) was great for Gibson in terms of the coverage.
I’m not complaining about it — it’s all fair game — but observing that McCain’s team made a strategic mistake in their handling of her. With so few early interviews, and such a delay before they were even given at all, the effect of flubs was much magnified; even if you think that the interviews weren’t intended to provide more of those moments than a normal interview, much of the rest of the media used them that way. Again, I’m not crying foul — all elements of the media know their market, and that’s trending Democrat-wards since before 2006 and Obama-wards this year and I don’t begrudge them their chance to earn a living — just observing how I see it. I think that the McCain campaign would have been far better advised to get her doing more interviews early on (note that now she’s doing more press stuff and doing much better overall, with mistakes being diluted by the other stuff).
Comment by Adam — 10/27/2008 @ 12:51 pm
I’m not going to contest your view of the McCain campaign’s handling of Palin. She’s a walking disaster, but surely there are better ways and worse ways of dealing with that.
If the media retroactively treated her answers to those questions as though they were “gotcha” moments — and it’s the connotation here that bothers me, most people think gotcha questions are unfair or slanted, purposefully designed to trip up a candidate to garner ratings just as you have alluded — it’s because SHE turned them into a “gotcha” moment. Seriously, how do you fuck up “what do you read?” Her Couric interview was entirely self-inflicted. She couldn’t coherently string sentences together and that’s NOT an exaggeration.
Comment by tessellated — 10/27/2008 @ 1:19 pm
Heh.
Comment by James — 10/27/2008 @ 2:13 pm
Haha, that’s twice lately you’ve caught me by surprise, James.
Comment by tessellated — 10/27/2008 @ 4:00 pm
It doesn’t mean unfair at all (as I have said at least once, I am not crying ‘foul’), so far as I am concerned. It means ‘there to trip you up’, as I use it, and if I were a political journalist and I thought I could get a moment like that, I’d use it, personally (if I were interviewing Biden, I’d try to bait him into saying something impolitic; with Obama or McCain, I’d put much less effort into it as they are somewhat less likely, even though they have both stumbled on occasion, to say something daft). Also, of course, I am not suggesting that it was just a barrage of those questions…
Comment by Adam — 10/27/2008 @ 4:12 pm
Well I realize you have come back more than once to clarify that’s not what you meant. That’s why I said most people and not specifically you. Clearly that is how Palin and McCain feel what with all there talk of media elites and their cocktail parties. “Gotcha” journalism itself has recently become yet another buzzword in that constellation of cliches surrounding this campaign and it is in no small part thanks to Palin. She routinely rails on about the media filter blah blah in her stump speeches and elsewhere.
I’ll just reiterate here, that I don’t even think most of the Couric questions were asked specifically to trip her up. This is very subjective so reasonable people can disagree but it seems to me most of them were of the “getting to know you and your positions variety” and were quite predictable at that. How can a question be a verbal trap when you *expect* it? Most of Palin’s stumbles came during the follow up question. I suppose you could argue that Couric was trapping her in that sense: by not letting Palin get away with obviously rehearsed talking points.
Comment by tessellated — 10/27/2008 @ 4:33 pm
I personally don’t think that a ‘getting to know you’ interview would be as good for the interviewer or the channel as an interview with flubs in it. I mean, I just can’t really see it, so there’d be a strong motivation — for a journalist that likes to get a bigger audience and grab some attention — to get at least a few notable screw-ups from the candidate being interviewed, if it were likely to be possible.
Comment by Adam — 10/27/2008 @ 4:37 pm
Unless you’re Fox.
Comment by Brad — 10/27/2008 @ 4:41 pm
For Palin, yeah. They’re ideological hacks. Even MSNBC, which has hired and/or elevated some ideological hacks (Maddow, Olberman) isn’t near Fox (yet, maybe).
Comment by Adam — 10/27/2008 @ 4:48 pm