The Palin Fiasco

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Todd Purdhum has an article in Vanity Fair which summarizes all that went wrong with the McCain campaign after he made the mistake of choosing Sarah Palin to be his running mate. He raises the question of how such a huge mistake could have been made and how someone like Palin could have even been considered for the position:

What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded? What does her prominence say about the importance of having (or lacking) a record of achievement in public life? Why did so many skilled veterans of the Republican Party—long regarded as the more adroit team in presidential politics—keep loyally working for her election even after they privately realized she was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice-presidency? Perhaps most painful, how could John McCain, one of the cagiest survivors in contemporary politics—with a fine appreciation of life’s injustices and absurdities, a love for the sweep of history, and an overdeveloped sense of his own integrity and honor—ever have picked a person whose utter shortage of qualification for her proposed job all but disqualified him for his?

McCain picked Palin as a gamble without knowing much about her. Among her problems, Sarah Palin plays loosely with the truth, and didn’t even bother to study the actual facts that mattered outside of Alaska:

…no serious vetting had been done before the selection (by either the McCain or the Obama team), and there was trouble in nailing down basic facts about Palin’s life. After she was picked, the campaign belatedly sent a dozen lawyers and researchers, led by a veteran Bush aide, Taylor Griffin, to Alaska, in a desperate race against the national reporters descending on the state. At one point, trying out a debating point that she believed showed she could empathize with uninsured Americans, Palin told McCain aides that she and Todd in the early years of their marriage had been unable to afford health insurance of any kind, and had gone without it until he got his union card and went to work for British Petroleum on the North Slope of Alaska. Checking with Todd Palin himself revealed that, no, they had had catastrophic coverage all along. She insisted that catastrophic insurance didn’t really count and need not be revealed. This sort of slipperiness—about both what the truth was and whether the truth even mattered—persisted on questions great and small. By late September, when the time came to coach Palin for her second major interview, this time with Katie Couric, there were severe tensions between Palin and the campaign.

By all accounts, Palin was either unwilling, or simply unable, to prepare. In the run-up to the Couric interview, Palin had become preoccupied with a far more parochial concern: answering a humdrum written questionnaire from her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman. McCain aides saw it as easy stuff, the usual boilerplate, the work of 20 minutes or so, but Palin worried intently.

As time went on, members of McCain’s campaign realized they made a huge mistake:

As Palin has piled misstep on top of misstep, the senior members of McCain’s campaign team have undergone a painful odyssey of their own. In recent rounds of long conversations, most made it clear that they suffer a kind of survivor’s guilt: they can’t quite believe that for two frantic months last fall, caught in a Bermuda Triangle of a campaign, they worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be. They quietly ponder the nightmare they lived through. Do they ever ask, What were we thinking? “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah,” one longtime McCain friend told me with a rueful chuckle. “You nailed it.” Another key McCain aide summed up his attitude this way: “I guess it’s sort of shifted,” he said. “I always wanted to tell myself the best-case story about her.” Even now, he said, “I don’t want to get too negative.” Then he added, “I think, as I’ve evaluated it, I think some of my worst fears … the after-election events have confirmed that her more negative aspects may have been there … ” His voice trailed off. “I saw her as a raw talent. Raw, but a talent. I hoped she could become better.”

They had hopes but also understood the ramifications of this mistake:

They all know that if their candidate—a 72-year-old cancer survivor—had won the presidency, the vice-presidency would be in the hands of a woman who lacked the knowledge, the preparation, the aptitude, and the temperament for the job.

5 Comments

  1. 1
    Leslie Parsley says:

    Someone at the NY Times wrote a lengthy and very revealing article for the Sunday magazine section. I did a quick search but couldn’t find it – too many Palin articles. Anyway, it was an excellent piece. Apparently, Palin was flown down to the low rent district in AZ where the maverick spent an entire hour with her. If I remember correctly, Cindy took a short stroll with Sarah while her hubby star gazed. When the two returned, Cindy signaled to hubby that Sarah was a-okay. This meeting took approximately one whole hour. The only other meeting was at a governors’ conference – much more casual and very, very short.

  2. 2
    Leslie Parsley says:

    The author of the NY Times article is Robert Draper in a 10/22/08 piece entitled “The making and remaking of mccain.” I was under the impression that this meeting had not lasted very long but I guess my memory fails me here.

    I’m not a Pit Bull with or without Lipstick but sometimes I don’t mind being a bit of a bitch. In that capacity I always like to refer people to factchecks.org’s analysis of an email sent almost around the whole world by Anne Kilkenny who knows Palin. 10/26/08

  3. 3
    Christoher Skyi says:

    Jonah Goldberg of NRO has what I think is terrific advice for Palin:
     
     
    “For starters, every time I see you on TV, you’re whining about unfair press coverage. Don’t get me wrong: Much of it is unfair, and some of it deserves a response. But it’s not presidential. It’s not even gubernatorial. You are constantly taking the bait, taking up the fights your biggest fans want you to take up.
     

    But here’s the thing: Don’t listen to your biggest fans. Don’t alienate them either, but don’t think that because the Palin4Pres crowd cheers, you’re making progress. Politics is ultimately about persuasion, and you seem entirely uninterested in that, preferring instead to play the victim. Well, victims don’t get elected president. Ronald Reagan was a laughingstock for liberals and despised by the press. But he didn’t whine or take the bait.
     

    Second, peddling a few platitudes and truisms about free markets and limited government is no substitute for really knowing what you’re talking about. Yes, you can talk well about the stuff you know — oil drilling, energy, etc. — but beyond your comfort zone, you fall back on bumper-sticker language that sounds fine to the people who already agree with you but is useless in winning over skeptics.”
     
    After a good diagnosis of Palin’s mistakes, he then provides a good proscription for how best to move forward:
     
     
    “Here’s the good news: You have time. Here’s the better news: You have something no one else in the party has — charisma. And I don’t mean you have the most charisma like it’s a consolation prize for not being elected prom queen. If money could buy what you have, Romney would have bought it all by now. Good politicians can learn how to win over audiences, but the great ones are born with the ability. Reagan had it. Clinton had it. Obama has it. You have it. You are the “It Girl” of the GOP.
     

    What you lack, you can learn. If knowing how to describe the situation in Pakistan or explain the “doughnut hole” in health-care coverage was all you needed to get elected, an intern with a subscription to The Economist could be president.
     

    So here’s my advice. Stay home and do your job and your homework. You’ll still be a national figure come the primaries. But if you can’t surprise your detractors with your grasp of policy when you re-emerge on the national stage, you won’t win the nomination. More important, you won’t deserve to.”

     

  4. 4
    Ron Chusid says:

    Sounds like good advice. Did he also say anything about stepping down as governor?

  5. 5
    Christoher Skyi says:

    It’s possible politics just really isn’t for her — but that doesn’t mean she’ll be out the public eye: she’s one of the most famous women on the planet now — she’s got a LOT of cultural capital going for her.   As for the resignation, it feels like there’s another shoe to drop — the question is:  how big is it?

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