Word: campaigning
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...small screen. Brimming with cracker-barrel charm and acerbic scorn, she ridiculed Barack Obama, championed conservative positions and solutions and attacked as clueless the media, with which she has clashed so often. Her foes, including many of the aides who worked for Senator John McCain on his 2008 presidential campaign, also saw a familiar figure - one who, in their estimation, stumbled over syntax, fumbled with the truth and appeared ill informed, incoherent, vindictive and silly during her two months on the national ticket. (See pictures of Sarah Palin's life since the election...
McCain's former aides watched Palin's Fox debut with the same trepidation with which they anticipated the publication of her memoir in November. Around the time of the book's release, McCain convened an unusual conference call with the top staffers of his campaign. McCainworld had been braced for Palin's tome for months, fearing she would use it to settle scores against a group of aides she had turned against - and vice versa. In the call, however, McCain implored his people to refrain from commenting on the book. He had no appetite for an ugly public airing...
Palin's memoir outraged many people involved in the McCain-Palin operation. She portrayed McCain's aides as controlling, frazzled and easily spooked. They, in turn, saw in her book an array of the qualities they had come to discern in her during the campaign: the self-serving habits, the malice, the distant relationship with the truth. For McCainworld, all the old feelings toward Palin came back in a rush. But except for chief strategist Steve Schmidt's concise dismissal of the book ("fiction") and communications adviser Nicolle Wallace's somewhat more lengthy refutation on The Rachel Maddow Show, virtually...
Adding to the picture are the revelations voiced by Schmidt on 60 Minutes - in particular, her habitual shading of the truth in ways that exposed the campaign to extreme political vulnerability. "You know, it [was] the equivalent of saying down is up and up is down," Schmidt told Anderson Cooper on the program. "[She routinely said things] that were provably, demonstrably untrue...
That other McCain aides have kept quiet for so long about Palin owes to two factors. The first is loyalty to McCain. With his hatred of infighting, desire to put the campaign behind him and perhaps awareness of his complicity in foisting Palin on the world, the erstwhile Republican nominee has encouraged his people to stifle their criticisms and play down their disagreements with her, even though the direction Palin's vision for the future direction of the GOP is diametrically opposed to McCain...