McCain Aides Trying to Sabotage Palin 2012?

All Obama, or any of her Republican opponents, would need to do is play the worst parts of the Couric interview, with superimposed text from the OP and she's toast. It doesn't matterwhether it's true or not.

It can be overcome. Especially after four years of prep. All she has to say is what has already been said by the campaign advisors: She didn't have time to prep for that interview. And people will brush off those other accusations as the actions of sore losers trying to defelct blame from themselves.

And I don't think Palin will hold back on Obama like McCain did. After four years of Obama his presidency and his history before the presidency will be all over the place.

And her Republican opponents? I'm sure they will be crushed. Unless shes facing Jindal or Newt (who has his own baggage) there is no other Republican out there that is going to be tough to beat.

Don't get me wrong I'm not saying she will win the nomination but anyone who thinks her campaign will roll right over and sink after the first hit are going to be sorely mistaken.

Sure they do. Occasionally some of these folks have baggage of some sort but they are people of real conservative instincts as far as we can know by their actions:

Sarah Palin
Boby Jindal
Mark Sanford <<<Not talked about much but is really solid

Marsha Blackburn
Jeff Flake
Mike Pence
Eric Cantor
Paul Ryan << these five are in the House which usually you can't leap right to the Presidency from but they have a future

J.C. Watts
Michael Steele
Chip Pickering << These three are out of any office right now but are young enough to be on the radar

Tom Couburn
Jim DeMint
David Vitter
John Thune

Plus a few of the old war-horses like Newt Gingrich and Bill Frist and Fred Thompson

I think that who runs in 2012 has a lot to do with Obama's first term. if he does reasonably well he'll be hard to beat and I'd get out of the way and let Romeny offer himself up as the sacrificial lamb....if things go over the cliff and he becomes unpopular then it's a different story.

Her chances are in fine shape.

Palin needs to keep out of the limelight for a few years, get a decent education then in around 6 years time knock out a book, go on chat shows and do PR in preparation for a run in 2016.

As for defusing the Couric stuff and it's like, thats simple enough - she can mock herself, say she wouldn't have voted for her younger self and play the older and wiser card.

She can use this election to steamroller her way to the presidency in 8 years, but she needs to do a lot of work, come back and prove shes got the smarts for it.

That's the thing...there hasn't been a true dyed in the woll conservative at the top of a GOP ticket since 1984.

It's pretty hard to speculate about what would happen if we had a true conservative who knew how to persuasively articulate his or her beliefs running.

That depends on whether the grassroots will still be led by the Machine which seems to be less and less likely with each passing week. The makings are there for a big earthquake in the Republican Party.

You work with Canada daily through NAFTA, but you don't know that they're included in NAFTA?

Raoul, can you be normal again? The election is over.

there's no split among conservatives.

conservatives are in love with her (go over to FR and see if you can find a bit of doubt that any of this is bullshit)

McCain and his lackys are not conservatives.

I implied as much when I said it reflected poorly on McCain and his staff if she was really this bad and he went with her anyway.

That said, I would qualify by saying -
if it's true she's a shopaholic, answers the door in a robe, pitches tantrums, and refuses coaching....she could be all that and still be a good pick.

If it's true she doesn't know the countries in North America (BWA-HA-HA!!!) then she would be a bad pick.

It IS possible that she could know that the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are in NAFTA and be somewhat uncertain if some Caribbean or central American countries were included - I would not consider that to be a major negative - but the idea that she wouldn't know the big three is just silly.

Which is what makes all this shit so unbelievable. They could have said she didn't know the membership of NATO and that would have been credible, they could have said any number of things more credible than what they are claiming.

I gave them then - and do now - the same benefit of a doubt I gave Obama over "57 states" and that I give Biden over "FDR went on TV"

One can poke fun but I would not for a minute suggest either man actually didn't know the fact he bungled.

Not that it doesn't happen often. Or at the least provoke further investigation.

Still, if you are a reporter and your choice is to violate your professional ethics, or let a woman that dumb become vice president - which is more important?

And I'll re-iterate...you could pull a crack whore out of the trailer park in South Carolina (hi Forbin!) and she can name a newspaper. The notion that she didn't answer that question because she couldn't is akin to saying she didn't answer it because her alien overlords hadn't told her what to say.

Are you kidding?

Look at all the theoretically damaging video and audio of Obama that exists!

Saying of himself he had no business ruining for President, his own wife saying the same thing, the coal comment and a dozen others like it....there's a ton of stuff that logically SHOULD have hurt him bad, most of which he never even had to address.

McCain had this in the bag and so fucked it up it's almost unfathomable. His strategy when he was running ads like the "We are the one" ad, plus speaking about sensible policy were working. He added Palin which fired up the Right base. All he had to do was keep going. Instead he floundered like a newly castrated sheep He lost focus and began to ramble and run very negative ads. He lost making his case and he should be flailed for that.

I agree. I've said myself a couple of times that she needs to write a book or two and build up her intellectual creds. Do a lot of interviews and write some policy papers and op-eds and show herself to be well spoken.

I don' think she'll have any problem doing that. what she needs more than anything is someone with some savvy about politics outside Alaska to mentor her and give her good advice about filling in the weaker spots.

But someone who's a true-blue conservative, not someone who will tell her she needs to move to the middle.

she needs NEWT!!!

As a mentor, yes.

I can use a computer or car without knowing many of the basics of how it works, what the names are of its parts, what they look like or how they individually work.

I can use my Constitututional rights without knowing specifically what they are, where they are found in the Constitution or case law.

And yes, hypothetically someone could be involved in trade with one nation under NAFTA and yet not realize that NAFTA includes the three nations it does, or wrongly think it includes other nations.

I haven't changed from the beginning of the election till now.

OK, fine. A split among Republicans then.

Wouldn't that be an argument in favor of it being true?

In other words, if they were just trying to make stuff up, why not make something up that would be easier to believe was true that would yet show her to be underprepared?

Not that it doesn't happen often. Or at the least provoke further investigation.[/quote]

It's very rare that a newspaper burns a source. Reporters go to jail to avoid revealing who their sources were.

WRT these specific allegations, again, there's plenty of stuff on the record to suggest that Palin wasn't the brightest. The fact that these specific allegations were not doesn't really say much.

We can also look at how the campaign treated Palin: they tended to keep her from doing interviews and press conferences. Why was that?

It's more important to maintain your professional and legal ethics. If you violate those for whatever reason, you lose all credibility and aren't left with much. Even if your ethics and your legal obligations are not important to you for some reason, practical considerations would come into play. Breaking your word could lead to you losing your job and at a minimum prevent you from breaking other stories that are reliant on confidential sources.

Moreover, a) it's not a reporter's job to prevent someone from becoming VP or president and b) even if it were, reporting these facts would not necessarily change the dynamic of things tremendously. If there were a videotape of Sarah Palin talking about the country of Africa and being puzzled about which nations are in NAFTA, it sounds like you would lump it in the same category of mistake that all candidates make sometime along the campaign trail rather than either actual ignorance or a deliberate misstatement.

There are plenty of other ways to reveal that Palin was not the brightest person than burning a source, and I'd submit that many of those got in the public domain as things stood. More allegations will likely come to the fore as post-mortems continue.


And I'll re-iterate...you could pull a crack whore out of the trailer park in South Carolina (hi Forbin!) and she can name a newspaper. The notion that she didn't answer that question because she couldn't is akin to saying she didn't answer it because her alien overlords hadn't told her what to say.[/QUOTE]

When I heard this this morning it made me so glad I decided not to vote for McCain. Not only is he a Loser, he's an unprincipled, shifty little cocksucker. Choosing Palin was one of about three bright things he did in the entire campaign and now he's kissing up to Obama on one hand and smearing Palin on the other?

You know what? Even if every bad thing about Palin from that original post is 100% true, you know whose fault it is? McCain's. He should've done his homework and if he wasn't prepared to deal with any baggage Palin brought, he shouldn't have chose her.

That said, I suspect it is about 90+% bullshit. Palin didn't go from just some blue collar person to successful in life and governor of Alaska by being a fuckup. If McCain hadn't picked Palin the race wouldn't have even been close because the conservatives would never have voted for that Loser. But his choice of Palin made a lot of people give him the benefit of the doubt.

People can't even remember that 4 years ago the Democrats in Congress gave Fannie/Freddie a clean bill of health, yelled at the regulator for picking on them, and claimed forced sub-prime lending was a successful program. And those were circumstances that led to a collapse of the housing and financial markets.

Alaska is sending a criminal back to Congress...I hardly hold any regard for Alaska voters, so Palin getting to the governorship there means diddly squat.

Especially considering her job before governor...

As someone pointed out Tuesday night, Alaska law provides for a special election within 90 days when Stevens is removed from office. the did not vote for Stevens to be senator, they voted for a genuine fair election when the inevitable happens.

Seems like a smart move to me.

Kudos to Campbell Brown....

[yt=exactly right]9btFMzilwMg[/yt]

His parents will not mind. They will be able to finally get their basement back.

From ABC News:

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/11/palin-aide-offe.html


Perfectly reasonable explanations - likely there are similar accounts for all that's been said.

Hopefully the staffers who are doing CYA will get enough backlash they'll have to find a new line of work.

Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC:

"Gov. Palin did nothing wrong"

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/27591042#27591042

"She is perhaps the most 'un-diva' politician I have ever seen"

You're right there. Obama won because of the "Hope" and "Change" chant. If it had anything to do with his liberal policies then his supporters wouldn't be so clueless as to where he stands. The only reason Democrats are in control of the congress is because they got conservative candidates to run as democrats. No, conservatism is alive and well, even with the change in parties.

Um.....no. Bush would have gotten killed. He's been polling in the 30s forever, liberals hate him,moderates hate him, and many conservatives hate him.McCain and most Republicans were hurt this cycle by having relations of any kind to Bush. Every Republican that lost his seat this year had an opponent who branded them a Bush Republican. George W. Bush was nothing short of radioactive and that's why no candidate wanted him campaigning for them.It's very unusual for a the party standard bearer to be told "stay away." I'm sure if that scenario had of played, McCain would have still ran against Bush in the primary and kicked his ass.

While looking for another video, I found that one...but I also found that Matthews and Olberman (surprise surprise!!) took all the accusations as gospel fact with no skepticism at all, nor did their guests.

The video I was looking for doesn't seem easy to find on the MSNBC site but it's on the hotair blog here:

http://hotair.com/archives/2008/11/07/palin-on-the-leakers-those-guys-are-jerks/

The latter clip is much longer and shockingly, she uses multi-syllable words on occasion!

I think that any McCain staffers feeding this stuff to the media are doing it for at least two reasons.

1) They're pissed off at the fact that absent Sarah Palin's presense on the ticket, McCain would've lost in the biggest landslide election since Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale like a borrowed mule in 1984. If there was a drag on the McCain / Palin ticket, it was John McCain.

2) The RINOs want to destroy any chance of a true conservative rising to prominance in the party. The real fight over the course of the next two to four years will be for control of the GOP.

OK. I gotta give McCain SOME credit, in that he's now slamming the staffers that smeared Palin.

You know what? No I don't. Fuck him. He can't control his people, he's accountable. And it just might be him being his schizophrenic self; trying to have his cake and eat it to--slime her and then deny it, but the damage is already done.

Remembering policy issues is hard -- especially ones which few people paid attention to anyway. (And that's putting aside whether your characterizations are accurate.)

By contrast, remembering one or two well-hyped personal things about politicians is pretty easy.

Most people couldn't tell you a thing about Dan Quayle's co-authoring an important job-training bill or the rest of his political career. But I think if you asked anybody who misspelled "potato," who is no Jack Kennedy, or who criticized Murphy Brown for being an unwed mom, the percentage who knew those things would probably be far higher.

Same with other bits of personal trivia from various other candidates -- Willie Horton, the tank and his bloodless response to what he would do if someone raped and killed his wife are all things people will associate w/ Dukakis, but not whatever the details of the "Massachussets Miracle" might have been.

John Edwards is going to be remembered as the $400 haircut guy and a rich trial lawyer, rather than for any policy achievements he may have made.

And given Tina Fey's portrayal of Palin, I think that labeling her as clueless will probably stick with her at least till 2012, assuming she doesn't do something to disspell it.

I think his supporters are actually pretty clued in as to where he stands, or if they aren't, it's on them, because he spelled out what he believed on his web site, three presidential debates, several primary debates, press conferences and speeches. He didn't just repeat "Hope" and "change" for 2 years.

I'm not. Even as radioactive as Bush is, people like him. And really, at the end of the day, that is what dictates a lot of presidential votes: who would you rather have a beer with? The guy who has been the answer to that question has won election just about every time since the television era, if not every time.

I also think that there's very few votes that McCain got that Bush wouldn't have also gotten, and there are plenty of people who voted against McCain on grounds such as the selection of Palin, his erratic campaigning, his age, etc. that would have voted for Bush. Finally I think Bush would have run a far better campaign, and would have been able to hit Obama harder on the experience issue.

1. Losing by a moderate amount's just as bad as losing by a lot, as far as I'm concerned.

2. Polls indicate a lot of people had concerns about Palin's readiness.

3. A parade of high-profile Republicans either said they were voting for Obama and specifically cited the selection of Palin and what it said about McCain's judgment or said they believed Palin unqualified.

I would say given that, there's plenty of blame to be assessed for both halves of the ticket.

I'm not sure she'll have to hold back. If Obama begins to turn into another Carter and screws up as badly as Carter did, the media will turn on him like a pack of rabies infect hounds in my opinion.

Four years is a long time especially in the political world. Voters don't remember things that far back and more than likely won't care what Palin said to Couric in 2012 if she chooses to run for office.

I'd love to see her run for office. She doesn't strike me as quite the loser that McCain is when it comes to running for President. Why the Republicans thought that McCain had a chance in hell given his track record for running for President is amazing. You can't get the type of support from the base that you need in a years time when you have repeatedly screwed over your party for decades before.

-American voters just sent a man to the White House who has close ties to criminals
-Massachusetts kept sending Kennedy back to office after Chappaquitik
-Pennsylvania voters sent Murtha back to congress even after he called them racist and rednecks
-Barney Frank got re-elected even after this latest housing market mess
-New Orleans re-elected Mayor Nagin even after his incompetence during Hurricane Katrina

etc.etc.etc.