Palin-Palooza
With Going Rogue: An American Life about to hit the stands, the Palin party kicks off with Drudge’s excerpt. Innocent’s a broad:
Chapter Four; Section 8, pages 255-257
By the third week in September, a “Free Sarah” campaign was under way and the press at large was growing increasingly critical of the McCain camp’s decision to keep me, my family and friends back home, and my governor’s staff all bottled up. Meanwhile, the question of which news outlet would land the first interview was a big deal, as it always is with a major party candidate.
From the beginning, Nicolle [Wallace] pushed for Katie Couric and the CBS Evening News. The campaign’s general strategy involved coming out with a network anchor, someone they felt had treated John well on the trail thus far. My suggestion was that we be consistent with that strategy and start talking to outlets like FOX and the Wall Street Journal. I really didn’t have a say in which press I was going to talk to, but for some reason Nicolle seemed compelled to get me on the Katie bandwagon.
“Katie really likes you,” she said to me one day. “she’s a working mom and admires you as a working mom. She has teenage daughter like you. She just relates to you,” Nicolle said. “believe me, I know her very well. I’ve worked with her.” Nicolle had left her gig at CBS just a few months earlier to hook up with the McCain campaign. I had to trust her experience, as she had dealt with national politics more than I had. But something always struck me as peculiar about the way she recalled her days in the White House, when she was speaking on behalf of President George W. Bush. She didn’t have much to say that was positive about her former boss or the job in general. Whenever I wanted to give a shout-out to the White House’s homeland security efforts after 9/11, we were told we couldn’t do it. I didn’t know if that was Nicolle’s call.
Nicolle went on to explain that Katie really needed a career boost. “She just has such low self-esteem,” Nicolle said. She added that Katie was going through a tough time. “She just feels she can’t trust anybody.”
I was thinking, And this has to do with John McCain’s campaign how?
Nicolle said. “She wants you to like her.”
Hearing all that, I almost started to feel sorry for her. Katie had tried to make a bold move from lively morning gal to serious anchor, but the new assignment wasn’t going very well.
“You know what? We’ll schedule a segment with her,” Nicolle said. “If it doesn’t go well, if there’s no chemistry, we won’t do any others.”
Meanwhile, the media blackout continued. It got so bad that a couple of times I had a friend in Anchorage track down phone numbers for me, and then I snuck in calls to folks like Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and someone I thought was Larry Kudlow but turned out to be Neil Cavuto’s producer. I had a friend call Bill O’Reilly after I was inundated with supporters in Alaska asking why the campaign was “ignoring” his on-air requests for a McCain campaign interview. I had another friend scrambling to find Mark Levin’s number. Aboard the campaign plane I was within twenty-five feet of reporters for hours on end. Headquarters’ strategy was that I should not go to the back of the aircraft and talk to the press. At first this was subtle, but as the campaign wore on, Tracey or Tucker would call headquarters to request permission, and someone in DC would respond, “No! Absolutely not- block her if she tries to go back.”
Althouse: “Sarah Palin is dumb.” Pretty scathing. She does come across somewhere between mushroom … kept in the dark .. and babe in the woods, though.
Washington Post: With early leak, Palin’s off and running.
AP re Palin: Going rogue with the facts.
Powerline re AP: Going wrong with the fact check.
Steyn: How many AP scribblers does it take to bollix a Palin fact check? (answer: 11)
Patterico: How many MSNBCs does it take not to know the most famous Photoshopped photo ever was Photoshopped? (answer: 1)
(The latter three links compliments of Surber’s Daily Scoreboard, which also has links to the greatest and the worst things since sliced bread, which just turned 80 years old.)
Get me rewrite! Politco: McCain aide denies Palin’s Couric pity claim.
Everybody wants a piece of her. Memeorandum. So, what does any of this mean for Palin’s political future? Poll-wise, that hasn’t been looking all that great lately, but that matters right now about as much as this first blush of Politerati reax does. Matthew Continetti at WSJ with some thoughts on that. Basically … America loves a self-reinvention.
Surber notes that the media fixation can’t hurt. They’re spellingher name right.
Speaking of getting a piece of her, get yours here: Going Rogue: An American Life
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Topics: pols
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:10 pm Comments (4) on Friday, November 13, 2009
4 Responses to “Palin-Palooza”
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November 14th, 2009 at 8:15 am
Thanks for posting this, Jules.
It appears that there are key failpoints – one was the definition of roles and responsibilities and two were the unstated assumptions that led the team to have conflict.
I would have taken “wanting to be liked” as code for someone pandering to the liberal establishment.
November 14th, 2009 at 11:59 am
I don’t care if Palin ever runs for office again. But I expect her to be a particularly annoying and effective gadfly to the left for many years to come.
November 14th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
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November 14th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
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