by Jack Lee
On 60 minutes last night one of the book authors of Game Change said the McCain people said Sarah Palin was virtually clueless about American history. They had to train her up on almost everything and it was too much for her to assimilate in such a period of short time. And this left many in the McCain campaign worried she would make a major blunder speaking on the stump trail.
The gossipy new campaign book that has the political world buzzing portrays Sarah Palin not just as an ignoramus who believed Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 but also as possibly mentally unstable.
It’s interesting how Palin became McCain’s VP choice and what little effort went into the decision. Until just a few days before crunch time McCain believed his VP nominee would be Joe Lieberman. According to the authors, they met a lot of resistance when they floated the trial balloon, in fact republicans went apoplectic and they had to pick else and fast. McCain barely knew Palin and most people in the lower 48 had never heard of her. However, there was such a rush to find a replacement to Lieberman the McCain camp only had one lawyer vet her, nobody actually went to Alaska to do a background, in fact nobody did any in-depth research on her because they just didn’t have time. So, they just gambled that she could pull it off and they were right! In the end they felt they lost by a smaller margin with her than without her.
(A smokin hot Palin is characterized on left – It’s one of those internet creations, not real.) Despite Palin’s “alleged”
lack of knowledge about history, including WW1, WWII, the Korean War and the real reasons for the current war in Iraq and Afghanistan, that stuff never came up and later on many people say she actually won the debate with Biden. She came off looking far more interesting than three of the four people in the race.
Despite Obama’s victory, the left continues to assail Palin as an idiot who is not presidential material because unlike McCain, Palin still has some political mileage left. Since her run for VP she’s become an extremely popular speaker and has made a ton of money from her own tell-all book, Going Rogue. Harper Collins has increased printing to 2.5 million, which dwarfs Bill Clinton’s book sales.
Whatever you feel about Palin, she is undeniably very good at delivering a stump speech and handling herself in a debate. She’s confident, poised and says exactly what most conservatives want to hear. She may not have a clue about World War I, but she has become a popular and influential political figure.
Helen Kennedy of the New York Daily News reports:
“Game Change,” the 2008 deconstruction, says the stress of vaulting onto the national stage caused Palin to have wild mood swings.
“One minute, Palin would be her perky self; the next she would fall into a strange blue funk,” the authors write.
The morning of her ill-fated CBS interview with Katie Couric, Palin – “her eyes glassy and dead” – was unresponsive to attempts to prep her as she was being made up.
“As they were about to set off to meet Couric, Palin announced ‘I hate this makeup’ – smearing it off her face, messing up her hair, complaining she looked fat,” the book relates.
Palin went on to give answers to Couric that were so incoherent the interview permanently damaged her.
Palin went into a tailspin. She stopped eating or sleeping, and drank only a half a can of diet soda a day, recounts the book written by John Heilemann of New York magazine and Mark Halperin of Time magazine.
“When her aides tried to quiz her she would routinely shut down – chin on her chest, arms folded, eyes cast to the floor, speechless and motionless, lost in what those around her described as a kind of catatonic stupor,” the book says.
“If I had known everything I know now, I would not have done this,” the book quotes Palin as saying.
She talked often about her baby, Trig, who spent most of the time in Alaska, and some John McCain aides thought she might be suffering postpartum depression.
When the campaign took her to Arizona to prep for the veep debate, McCain’s staff made sure a doctor friend was on hand “to observe her,” the book says.
Palin’s spokeswoman Meg Stapleton has dismissed the book’s allegations as inaccurate gossip from people who weren’t there.
“The governor’s descriptions of these events are found in her book, ‘Going Rogue.’ Her descriptions are accurate,” Stapleton said in a statement Sunday night to 60 Minutes.” “She was there. These reporters were not.”
“Game Change,” which features priceless images like Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Mike Huckabee in a line at a pre-debate urinal, making fun of the absent Mitt Romney – also up contains many other revelations:
The book says aides feared Bill Clinton was jeopardizing his wife’s run by having an affair in 2006. The book says a trio of Hillary’s top aides formed “a war room within a war room” to counter gossip about her husband and were able to discount all philandering rumors but one.