Gee, isn't this a surprise?Writing in this month’s Vanity Fair, Todd Purdum catalogs just how rapidly Sarah Palin has burned through friends and confidantes.For more, see "It Came from Wasilla" (as in a cheezy Godzilla/monster movie) at Vanity Fair. Here's a classic paragraph, confirming everything most Democrats were saying after McCain picked Palin to be his running mate:
Walter Hickel, the former Alaska governor who chaired Palin’s gubernatorial campaign in 2006, told Purdum, “I don’t give a damn what she does.”
And John Bitney, a junior-high school friend and former legislative liaison for Palin, said, “I find it’s frustrating dealing with Sarah, because it seems we’re always dealing with emotional crap, and we never seem to be able to focus on the business at hand. Check my feet for horseshoes if I have to sit there and listen to another talk show.”
Purdum also catalogs just how rapidly Palin has burned her bridges. By the end of the campaign, he writes, several aides to her running-mate John McCain — Steve Schmidt, Nicolle Wallace and Tucker Eskew — “were barely on speaking terms with her.”
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.”The question is, how could anyone in their right mind and with half a brain have ever thought that? I'm baffled.
P.S. Part of me says, "oh please Republicans nominate Sarah Palin in 2012 and we'll crush her," while the other part says, "God forbid, we can't risk the slight chance she might actually win the election."
