John McCain’s Responsible for Sarah Palin
06 November 2008 8:55 am by Taylor Marsh
BY TAYLOR MARSH
Talk about redux and cya, especially John McCain’s. Let the McCain v. Palin wars begin…. er, continue.
“She did not say, ‘I will not prepare,’ ” a McCain adviser said. “She just didn’t have a bandwidth to do a mock interview session the way we had prepared before. She was just overloaded.”
Sarah didn’t have the bandwidth. It leaves you speechless.
Oh, but rest easy. Randy Scheunemann wasn’t actually fired.
But Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager, and Mr. Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, said Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had in fact not been dismissed. Mr. Scheunemann, who picked up the phone in his office at McCain campaign headquarters on Wednesday afternoon, responded that “anybody who says I was fired is either lying or delusional or a whack job.”
Whatever the permutations, the advisers said they strongly believed that Mr. Scheunemann was disclosing, as one put it, “a constant stream of poison” to William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and a columnist for The New York Times.
What a colossal, wide ranging screw up the choice of Sarah Palin has turned out to be for the Republicans. That’s the story today. No one is talking about the bump she gave John McCain out of the convention. Because once the Couric interview happened it was the start of the great unraveling.
Whatever the truth, one thing is certain. Ms. Palin, who laughingly told the prankster that she could be president “maybe in eight years,” was the catalyst for a civil war between her campaign and Mr. McCain’s that raged from mid-September up until moments before Mr. McCain’s concession speech on Tuesday night. By then, Ms. Palin was in only infrequent contact with Mr. McCain, top advisers said.
Sarah Palin, according to Carl Cameron’s sources, whoever they may be, didn’t accept preparation before the Katie Couric interview. She had “temper tantrums” when seeing bad press clippings and was “hard to control emotionally.” Oh, and Sarah thought she was badly handled, too. Well, well, well, let the trashing begin. The woman should never have been on the vice presidential ticket. Who again made that choice? Where is his name in all of this?
The stunning reference to McCain’s awareness of the implosion happening inside the campaign in Bumiller’s piece goes like this:
He was aware of the infighting, they said, but it is unclear how much he was inclined or able to stop it.
Inclined? Able to stop it?
Thank the gods and the American people that John McCain wasn’t handed the presidency. His ineptitude likely would have matched Bush. It’s his campaign. He’s supposed to be in charge.
Now all of a sudden it’s all Sarah Palin’s fault. Well, to the extent that she’s wholly and completely unqualified, I agree.
Who picked her?
I seriously have to ask the question why McCain is getting a pass in the post-mortem. It’s all about his advisers, his top people talking about the disaster inside. What about the man in charge of it?
A Democrat who handled something so critical as a veep pick would have been eviscerated by now. Yet the traditional media seems just a bit squeamish to come out and say John McCain was revealed to have incredibly poor leadership skills inside a campaign that had no compass, no soul and no conscience. I guess after his drubbing they feel sorry for him? How utterly pathetic.
John McCain gave the nod to pick Sarah Palin. He was smitten that day under the sycamore tree. It’s his own fault if he’s now ashamed. That’s as much the story as Sarah Palin. Window dressing, that’s the story of this year’s GOP ticket. The war hero and the beauty queen. They didn’t begin to have the stuff of national leadership.
So if you want to know just how crushed the Republican Party is today, the ticket of McCain – Palin says it all. A candidate at the top of the ticket who could only talk about foreign policy through the eyes of war, and a running mate who threw temper tantrums at the mean media. American just dodged a bullet.
