Sarah The Scapegoat
By Doug Mataconis | Related entries in 2008 Election, McCain, Palin
According to Roger Simon, John McCain’s aides and allies are ready to blame what appears to be an impending election loss on Sarah Palin:
John McCain’s campaign is looking for a scapegoat. It is looking for someone to blame if McCain loses on Tuesday.
And it has decided on Sarah Palin.
In recent days, a McCain “adviser†told Dana Bash of CNN: “She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone.â€
Imagine not taking advice from the geniuses at the McCain campaign. What could Palin be thinking?
Also, a “top McCain adviser†told Mike Allen of Politico that Palin is “a whack job.â€
Listen, I’ve been pretty critical of Sarah Palin over the past two months, but this is just pathetic.
If Sarah Palin has hurt the ticket, if she’s manifestly not qualified to be President, if she’s engaged in rhetoric that made McCain’s promise of a clean campaign seem like joke, if she’s demonstrated little understanding of the important issues of the day, and even if she doesn’t seem to know what the Vice-President actually does, whose fault is that ?
I’ll tell you whose, fault it is — it’s John McCain’s.
Simon puts it well:
It’s not like he was rushed. McCain wrapped up the Republican nomination in early March. He didn’t announce his choice for a running mate until late August.
Wasn’t that enough time for McCain to get to know Palin? Wasn’t that enough time for his crackerjack “vetters†to investigate Palin’s strengths and weaknesses, check through records and published accounts, talk to a few people, and learn that she was not only a diva but a whack job diva?
But McCain picked her anyway. He wanted to close the “enthusiasm gap†between himself and Barack Obama. He wanted to inject a little adrenaline into the Republican National Convention. He wanted to goose up the Republican base.
McCain is the one that picked her to be his running mate, after meeting her in person only one time and after a vetting process that was clearly superficial at best. If that pick has turned out to be mistake, it’s not Sarah Palin’s fault, it’s the fault of the man who exercised incredibly bad judgment in putting her on the ticket.
Originally posted at Below The Beltway
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, McCain, Palin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 30th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
I find it funny that no one can name these “advisors” or “insiders” in the McCain campaign.
I’ve been told by an unamed source inside the Obama campaign that he is going to withdrawal from the race to day 13 o’clock and eat Biden’s balding head with a dull rusty spoon.
Meanwhile, liberals like Andrew Greeley at the Chicago Sun Times are saying there is no way Obama can win.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/greeley/1247262,CST-EDT-greel29.article
October 30th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
If you read many of the Obama endorsements from Republicans, Palin is almost always sited as of the reasons they don’t support John McCain. That said, I agree with your post … it’s not her fault.
Even if Sarah Palin had turned out to be a better candidate, the way in which she was chosen still says some very important things about John McCain, and his style of decision making.
The McCain campaign has no one to blame but themselves.
… unlike 2000, and 2004, This Time, it was the Republicans who have clearly been over matched when it comes to prosecuting a successful Presidential campaign.
Just my opinion,
Todd
October 30th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
@thekansascitian – Oh good grief…
You do know how this stuff works, right? I mean, there’s a reason these are unnamed sources. Because otherwise they wouldn’t talk to the reporters. Why? For fear of getting eviscerated by McCain.
And this has happened over and over and over and over and over again. Remember the Clinton campaign?
Get with the program!
October 30th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
I find the whole concept of Palin being a net drag on the ticket tough to reconcile with reality. If he’d picked anyone but Palin, McCain would have been dead in the water; it may not do enough to unite the party behind him, but that was a minimum requirement. It should not escape notice that the crowds follow Palin, not McCain; that became viscerally clear when they started doing seperate rallies. If it’s driven a tiny number of the aristocratic wing of the party away from the ticket, so be it; that’s a shame, but could we at least pretend that we live in the real world, the real world where David Brooks has looking for any reason to vote for Obama for sixteen months and George Will was looking for any excuse at all to vote against McCain? And while it’s true that Palin’s approval rating has fallen, that’s to be expected in light of a vicious campaign of personal destruction waged by the media against a woman that most Americans didn’t know until recently. The bottom line is that picking Palin is the only smart thing McCain has done in the last six months. To suggest otherwise – still less to make her the scapegoat for why, in an election season that is incredibly though for the GOP, a factor that was known long before Palin was picked, long before McCain won the nomination, indeed, long before Iowa – is an utterly absurd claim.
October 30th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
There was a discussion a week or so ago on Winds of Change about conservative pundits gleefully throwing Sarah Palin under the bus. I will reiterate here what I said there: Where were they in early September when she and McCain looked poised to blow the doors off of Obama and Biden?
It’s not like Palin suddenly lost her marbles, or her folksy charm that drew people to her in the first place, between now and then. It was, well, the economy, stupid. The financial turmoil starting in mid-September made everything in the campaign that came before it ancient history, including Palin’s novelty value to the GOP ticket. Palin was simply swamped by the same tsunami of misfortune that washed over McCain himself, and she went from an asset to an irrelevancy almost overnight. The thing is though, I don’t see why the same fate wouldn’t have befallen anyone else McCain might have chosen as a running mate instead of Palin. If a bad economy is indeed the kiss of death for McCain because he’s a Republican, simply having someone else as his VP wouldn’t have changed that.
All this is to say that you can count me out of the Palin-bashing. The sad truth is that we will never know how strong or weak a candidate Palin really was, because she was nominated for an altogether different campaign from the one we’ve had ever since events on Wall Street began to intervene.
October 30th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Simon, we’ll never really know if picking someone else would have left McCain dead in the water. Would the base have stayed home if McCain had gone with Pawlenty or even Ridge (a heretic on abortion)? I’m sure they wouldn’t have shown up in massive crowds, but would they have stayed not voted? Or, more importantly, would the percentage of them who stayed home have outweighed the independents/centrists who would have voted for McCain had he chosen a different running mate?
I’ll grant that this was a very difficult year for the GOP and McCain might have found himself behind in the polls regardless of his choice. But I don’t think Palin was the ONLY chance McCain had at winning this thing. She shouldn’t be scapegoated and she hasn’t deserved the scorn and nastiness directed at her, but despite the energy she’s brought, her negatives are not insignificant.
October 30th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
There were several, actually, including David Frum who was writing critical pieces about her during the GOP Convention. And, Peggy Noonan who was caught making an off-mic comment about what a bad pick she was after an MSNBC appearance during the convention.
I agree, though, with your point that it was the economy that killed McCain.
My point in writing the post, though, was simply this — if McCain’s defenders are going to spend the post-Election period blaming Palin for the loss, then someone needs to call them on the fact that it was McCain who put her on the ticket to begin with. If they really think that she sunk the ticket, then what they’re actually saying is that John McCain destroyed his chance to win the White House all by himself.
October 30th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Alan – in a word, yes. If he picked anyone else, this election would have been over two months ago. The media would have spent the entire GOP convention talking about Obama’s speech, and the convention itself would have been fractious and difficult. Instead, the party emerged united with morale and momentum. And you can’t blame Palin for what the media subsequently did to her, or McCain’s cack-handed handling of the financial “crisis.”
October 30th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Simon — Yeah, at the time I said the Palin pick was great politics, and it was. I guess the question is: was it a short term gain, long term loss pick OR was there no long term gain pick available given that the financial crisis was a big loser for McCain and thus Palin was really the best he could do thanks to her energizing ability.
Obviously you believe there was no long term gain option, which is a fair enough reading. I think he may have been able to keep this thing closer and play small ball with a different pick. But it’s not like I can back that up with anything but my own opinions. We can’t replay history.
But I think we’re in agreement that Palin was by no means an automatic loser.
October 31st, 2008 at 9:28 am
@Simon — Brooks is about as big a McCain true believer as you’re going to find among conservative pundits. Nothing I’ve seen or read by him indicates that he’s done anything but try to defend McCain (both in his column and in appearance on Lehrer), insisting that the version we’ve seen running this campaign is not the *real* McCain. however, he explicitly rejects Palin as damaging to the GOP and symptomatic of the sort of populism which Brooks believes is undermining/overshadowing his party’s core values. I read and watch him weekly; perhaps there’s some other real world Brooks I’m missing?
@ Alan — Nastiness? No. Scorn? Yes. Nothing about the campaign she has waged has changed my mind about her. What we saw in the RNC speech is what we’re left with weeks later: a canny, polished, snarky, inflammatory speechmaker with no discernible policy prowess regarding federal-level issues. Compare to Obama, who’s taken his natural gifts (high intelligence, thoughtfulness, a lawyerly insistence on seeing all sides of a question) and augmented them with the necessary shifts in persona and articulation to craft a successful public persona. Faced with teaching a thinker how to campaign or teaching a campaigner how to think, I choose the former for what I think are obvious reasons.
I consider her treatment at the hands of McCain’s advisers to be the logical fall-out of a crappy campaign. But blame McCain? No one held a gun to her head, and it says everything that she leapt at this opportunity. She lost me at *I never blinked*. How soon we forget…
October 31st, 2008 at 12:11 pm
First, I agree that McCain and his team can’t slither away from the fact that they brought this shizznit upon themselves. They look slimy and petty and dishonest for complaining about Palin’s shortcomings as they see them now. Graceless. Classless. Sleep in the bed you made of your own choosing. Period.
I’d be far more persuaded by Simon’s rationalizations if I had not seen Palin’s utter unreadiness with my own eyes. That said, I thoroughly agree that McCain and Palin got swamped by economic events. Were we still simply muddling along with a little economic weakness, the race would be closer.
However, even if there was, as Alan suggests, no big long-term gain VP pick, I think that McCain would be in better shape right now under current circumstances if he had a different ticketmate. The GOP base would not have had a delightful refreshment to coo over, but they’d have shown up to vote against the socialist redistributionist and for Joe and Tito. And base nose-holders would then have more ample company in the form of fiscally concerned and skeptical centrists.
I know that I am in a minority overall when it comes to having a VP debate reaction of “are you F**KING kidding me” to Palin. Most folks said she did fine, But I also know that among skeptical moderates I’ve got LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of company.
Bottom line, right now Palin makes for a smaller GOP tent. More of the folks than usual who are inside are delighted. But it’s definitely a smaller tent in part because of Palin. You betcha!
October 31st, 2008 at 12:28 pm
One of Obama’s strengths has been his steady and long term oriented decision making. Had McCain taken the same track and chosen Pawlenty or Jindal or some other qualified and intelligent (but still exciting) individual he may not have had the screaming frenzy at the convention, but he would have certainly had a steady partner to help him make the race competitive in the home stretch. The polls are tightening, and if his campagn were not dragged down by the Palin fiasco (note the unceasing attention we’re paying to it. Anyone seen Biden lately?), McCain could have banked on his campaign themes of experience, readiness, and judgement. He also would have remained the star of the show. These were McCain’s best shots at derailing Obama. The Palin pick completely undermined (obliterated) his best chance. The economy may have tilted things toward Obama, but Palin has put McCain’s chances virtually out of reach. I’ll agree that Palin herself is not responsible. The boss is – he picked her.
Remember, Obama refused to cow-tow to left who were demanding a Hillary pick. That paid off. McCain should have been taking notes.
October 31st, 2008 at 2:00 pm
I’m glad he didn’t pick Jindal for a few reasons. My wife works in LA part of the year in Shreveport’s film industry so I’ve been following BJ and I think the state needs him more than the country does right now. And while I think he holds far more promise than Palin as a serious poltician and leader, I’m glad he wasn’t asked to cut short an equally brief gubernatorial career to take a job he may also be less than ready for. He is someone I’m looking forward to seeing as a GOP candidate by 2016, and perhaps 2012.