Sarah Palin Names Names
Obligatory Going Rogue Post.
Excerpts from the book are trickling out, including an interesting segment wherein Palin names names of McCain campaign advisers who, according to her, held her back.
In the excerpt, Palin describes how the McCain campaign kept up a media blackout after she was named as the VP candidate, despite the criticisms of the press. When she was on a plane with reporters and wanted to talk to them, Palin says, the headquarters would say “block her if she tries to go back.”
And Palin says Nicolle Wallace, the McCain communications aide who became (so it’s been reported) an arch-nemesis of Palin within the campaign, worked hard to convince Palin to do her first sit-down interview with CBS’s Katie Couric, painting Couric as someone with “low self-esteem” who needed a career boost.
The full excerpt, in the link above, is sort of interesting, though obviously the picture it paints—poor serious Palin wanting to talk to places like the Wall Street Journal while advisers cloistered her in with the likes of Katie Couric—is obviously laughably one-sided. And, from earlier leaks from McCain campaign advisers, it was pretty clear that Palin had pretty bad media and political instincts and a phenomenal lack of awareness of her own limitations and weaknesses, so essentially when the campaign trumped her, it really was for her own good.
Still, they did botch her first month pretty spectacularly badly (convention aside), though letting her loose wouldn’t have been very good either. In any case, I feel really bad for McCain in all this. The sheer audacity for Palin, plucked from total obscurity into the national spotlight that she clearly revels in and bizarrely thinks she deserves, backbiting on the campaign for holding her back, must be a little much to take.
She’s essentially right that the McCain camp screwed up how she was handled and also that some off the McCain advisors didn’t like her, I think.
I doubt if handling her better would have made enough difference for him to win the Presidency, but it would sure as Hell have made a difference to her chances of being a mainstream candidate.
Comment by Adam — 11/13/2009 @ 2:23 pm
Oh, I don’t disagree at all.
I guess the question would be if Palin’s ideas on how she should have been handled would have been any better (or, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to imagine, much worse).
Comment by Brad — 11/13/2009 @ 3:19 pm
It’ll come down to whether Palin’s judgement of how to run her political affairs is better than team McCain’s was. To be honest, as the McCain team knew relatively little about her, it’s entirely possible that they really didn’t work out how best to use her. As you say, though, her own judgement could be iffy; standing down as Governor of Alaska after little time seemed to be a great example of that, although if she was planning to go this course at the time then maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea as it hasn’t much hurt her with her core constituency. What I’d like to know is whether or not her core constituency could have been bigger and more mainstream, but that’s hard to tell.
Comment by Adam — 11/13/2009 @ 3:57 pm
I think they could have, and I hunted for a post or two of mine outlining at the time, prior to her being named, and after, what I thought that strategy should have been.
Of course, you can only put lipstick on a pig to such effect, and there is every conceivable reason to believe that even the best laid plans would have crumbled due to her sometimes brazen embrace of her own ignorance and ego. But, the McCain camp certainly botched it.
I have seen (and have posted about) some post-mortem leaks from campaign staffers about her behavior—not the clothes-buying kinds of things, but tacts that she was pushing the campaign to let her take, attacks she wanted to pursue, points she wanted to harp on, etc. The McCain campaign, in those cases, tended to stuff her back in the box (in memos her with points like, “unfortunately, that’s flagrantly not true and in facts contradicts a substantial part of our primary campaign and now general election tact, so at this time we politely decline your suggestion that we can Barack Obama an arugula-eating faggot” kinds of things), and in most cases, rightly so I think. From those sorts of insider stories, I got the distinct impression A. that nobody on the McCain campaign liked her, B. they were internally a lot more civil and cautious and even themselves uncomfortable with the drift of their campaign than I gave them credit, and C. Sarah Palin has the political instincts of Laura Inghram combined with Rich Lowry with a little bit of Ann Coulter and Jesse Benton thrown in.
Anyway, the McCain campaign, I believe, was facing an unwinnable fight. They would have lost that election 9 times out of 10, so I’m not sure what difference it ultimately would have made, though I shudder to think of the political atmosphere we might have wound up with had Sarah Palin been running things.
Comment by Brad — 11/13/2009 @ 5:06 pm
999 times out of 100, eh?
Comment by Adam — 11/13/2009 @ 7:07 pm
Exactly.
Comment by Brad — 11/13/2009 @ 7:09 pm
I had originally written 9 times out of 10, then started oscillating between that and 99 times out of 100, and then I had to go do something.
Comment by Brad — 11/13/2009 @ 7:11 pm
Luckily, unlike the rest of the plebs, I have the power to edit my own comments, so this never happened.
Comment by Brad — 11/13/2009 @ 7:11 pm
Tyranny!
Of course, I can edit everything too…
Comment by Adam — 11/13/2009 @ 7:16 pm