Saturday, October 25, 2008

Huh?? Palin´s Aids Say There is Tension in the McCain Losing Campaign Now She is Looking Forward to 2012 Going Solo! What Gives?

Palin Aids are speaking out and going to multiple Press contacts. They are saying McCain´s campaign is all but lost! His aids have screwed up her image! Palin is now looking towards salvaging her reputation and her own run for the Presidency in 2012!
What do you make of this? How can she do this so close to the Election? Has she really given up the 2008 election?
Reports are coming in from everywhere including CNN, YahooNews, Politico and others:
"Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline. "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.
The emergence of a Palin faction comes as Republicans gird for a battle over the future of their party: Some see her as a charismatic, hawkish conservative leader with the potential, still unrealized, to cross over to attract moderate voters. Anger among Republicans who see Palin as a star and as a potential future leader has boiled over because, they say, they see other senior McCain aides preparing to blame her in the event he is defeated."These people are going to try and shred her after the campaign to divert blame from themselves," a McCain insider said, referring to McCain's chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, and to Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush aide who has taken a lead role in Palin's campaign. Palin's partisans blame Wallace, in particular, for Palin's avoiding of the media for days and then giving a high-stakes interview to CBS News' Katie Couric, the sometimes painful content of which the campaign allowed to be parceled out over a week.
McCain aides, defending Wallace, dismissed the notion that Palin was mishandled. The Alaska governor was, they argue, simply unready — "green," sloppy and incomprehensibly willing to criticize McCain for, for instance, not attacking Sen. Barack Obama for his relationship with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright..Elements of her image-making went catastrophically awry. Her dodging of the press and her nervous reliance on tight scripts in her first interview, with ABC News, became a national joke — driven home to devastating effect by "Saturday Night Live" comic Tina Fey. The Couric interview — her only unstaged appearance for a week — was "water torture," as one internal ally put it.
Some McCain aides say they had little choice with a candidate who simply wasn't ready for the national stage, and that Palin didn't forcefully object. Moments that Palin's allies see as triumphs of instinct and authenticity — the Wright suggestion, her objection to the campaign's pulling out of Michigan — they dismiss as Palin's "slips and miscommunications," that is, her own incompetence and evidence of the need for tight scripting. But Palin partisans say she chafed at the handling. "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."
When a McCain aide, speaking anonymously Friday to The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, suggested that Palin's charge that Obama was "palling around with terrorists" had "escaped HQ's vetting," it was Scheunemann who fired off an angry response that the speech was "fully vetted" and that to attack Palin for it was "bullshit." Palin's "instincts," on display in recent days, have had her opening up to the media, including a round of interviews on talk radio, cable and broadcast outlets, as well as chats with her traveling press and local reporters. Reporters really began to notice the change last Sunday, when Palin strolled over to a local television crew in Colorado Springs.
"She was completely mishandled in the beginning. No one took the time to look at what her personal strengths and weaknesses are and developed a plan that made sense based on who she is as a candidate," the aide said. "Any concerns she or those close to her have about that are totally valid." But the aide said that Palin's inexperience led her to her own mistakes: "How she was handled allowed her weaknesses to hang out in full display." If McCain loses, Palin's allies say that the national Republican Party hasn't seen the last of her. Politicians are sometimes formed by a signal defeat — as Bill Clinton was when he was tossed out of the Arkansas governor's mansion after his first term — and Palin would return to a state that had made her America's most popular governor and where her image as a reformer who swept aside her own party's insiders rings true, if not in the cartoon version the McCain campaign presented. "There are people in this campaign who feel a real sense of loyalty to her and are really pleased with her performance and think she did a great job," said the McCain insider. "She has a real future in this party."

5 comments:

Dee said...

My gosh!
McCain supporters sure do NOT have much faith in Palin!

"Sen. Joe Lieberman on Friday skirted a question on whether vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is ready from day one to be president, saying "thank God" she won't have to be.

Lieberman, I-Conn., who has helped prep the Alaska governor on foreign policy issues, said his pal and GOP presidential nominee, John McCain, is in good health.

"Thank God, she's NOT gonna have to be president from day one, because McCain's going to be alive and well," Lieberman said in a conference call with reporters."

Dee said...

This from the Republican leaning paper, NYPost:
"The maverick mom is distancing herself from John McCain and blowing off the advice of senior Republican aides, convinced they're damaging her reputation and ruining the campaign.

Things have gotten so tense between Palin and her traveling staff, an insider said, that she's overruling their advice - which was evident last week when she ignored GOP aides piling into waiting cars at a Colorado event and strolled over to the press corps for an impromptu talk."

Dee said...

"A McCain insider told The Post that relations between Palin and some of the campaign aides with her have soured. "She's lost faith with the staff. She knows the $150,000- wardrobe story damaged her," the insider said.

But the novice vice-presidential candidate is partly to blame, the campaign official sniped. "She's an adult. She didn't ask questions about where the clothes came from?" the source said.

"She's now positioning herself for her own future. Of course, this is bad for John. It looks like no one is in charge."

Palin is not likely to roll over and let herself be scapegoated if things don't go well on Nov. 4.

"She's a lot savvier, politically speaking, than people give her credit for," said a GOP strategist.

"Everyone is trying to distance themselves from responsibility for the campaign going south. Why wouldn't she do the same?"

Anonymous said...

Well, if she does run in 2012, shudder the thought, she'd have to use something besides "Maverick".

I think "The Neiman Marcus Diva" would be fitting.

Or maybe "The Deludenoid"

Dee said...

There is more coming out today about her being angry at the McCain staffers.

She surely is planning on running as Prez in 2012.

But I also hear that the McCain staffers and other Republicans are looking to cast blame on someone for the loss and she may be an easy target. If it sticks, she may be finished politically.

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