Word: paliner
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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...
With the publication of our book, Game Change, and the appearance of Schmidt on 60 Minutes in a piece discussing our reporting, a sharper portrait of Palin has begun to surface, one that is often startling and sometimes shocking. We learned that Palin was scarcely vetted by McCain's lawyers before being placed on the Republican ticket. We learned more about her substantive deficiencies, which were even more dramatic than those that had previously been reported: her lack of understanding about why there are two Koreas, her ignorance about the function of the Federal Reserve, her belief that Saddam Hussein...
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...
...second reason is equally significant and a harbinger of the fights to come in the Republican Party: a deep fear of the Palin forces. Intimidated by the rabidness of her supporters, believing that they can't be swayed by facts and worried about getting crosswise with the most highly energized part of the Republican base, McCainworld has allowed her version of reality to go largely unchallenged - and her rise to continue unchecked. There is perhaps a related factor: a recent Washington Post poll found that Republicans regard Palin as the front runner for their party's 2012 nomination and that...