h/t: AoSHQ
Flashback before the election:
Even as John McCain and Sarah Palin scramble to close the gap in the final days of the 2008 election, stirrings of a Palin insurgency are complicating the campaign's already-tense internal dynamics.
Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline.
"She's lost confidence in most of the people on the plane," said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to "go rogue" in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.
"I think she'd like to go more rogue," he said.
The emergence of a Palin faction comes as Republicans gird for a battle over the future of their party: Some see her as a charismatic, hawkish conservative leader with the potential, still unrealized, to cross over to attract moderate voters. Anger among Republicans who see Palin as a star and as a potential future leader has boiled over because, they say, they see other senior McCain aides preparing to blame her in the event he is defeated.
"These people are going to try and shred her after the campaign to divert blame from themselves," a McCain insider said, referring to McCain's chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, and to Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush aide who has taken a lead role in Palin's campaign. Palin's partisans blame Wallace, in particular, for Palin's avoiding of the media for days and then giving a high-stakes interview to CBS News' Katie Couric, the sometimes painful content of which the campaign allowed to be parceled out over a week.
"A number of Gov. Palin's staff have not had her best interests at heart, and they have not had the campaign's best interests at heart," the McCain insider fumed, noting that Wallace left an executive job at CBS to join the campaign.
Post-election we see the McCain camp throwing her under the bus like Obama at a family reunion.
This is happening because--like all things McCain--he won't STFU and listen to the people he claims to represent. He wouldn't fight on real issues like the market meltdown, Wright etc. Instead he had a confused, mumbling, stumbling geriatric campaign.
Well, excuse the @#$% out of us and our girl if we decided not to follow THAT
modus operandi! Palin not being McCain was the only thing that got 40 million of the 55 million GOP voters to show up.
The fact is: THEY @#$%ed up. THEY chose this man that was reviled by the GOP base years before the primaries came up. The RINOs and the democrat saboteurs in New Hampshire gave him his win and the MSM built him up as inevitable. Of course the NYT et al did what we conservatives knew they would do: they called him the savior of the GOP, the Maverick, the Consensus Maker, He Who Reached Across Aisles...
...and as soon as he was nominated they called him The Doom of All Mankind and Palin was all 4 horseman wrapped in $150,000 of clothes should would have no inclination to buy on her own.
McCain seemed to be in denial that his praisers so suddenly became his accusers, but we saw it as yet another sign he won't listen to his betters. His handlers swore to us he could reach across aisles and win the independent middle.
What went wrong?
"It must be that Palin woman!" they started to sneer towards the end when the polls refused to budge for McCain. Surely they couldn't be wrong. They were the smart ones. The ivy leaguers.
MENTAL EXPERIMENT: When looking at the GOP intellectuals who trash Palin don't you feel like you do when liberals trash her? Don't you get that feeling of cold condescension that tells you the only reason you like her is because you just don't know any better? That all of your points about family roots untrampled by government intrusions no matter how well-intentioned are going unheeded because these people are just so smart you're not giving them the chance to make it all work for you?
Do they give you that feeling?
Well, now that they tried their best and--we are being told--we ruined it for them by distracting the poor little babies we will have to rebuild the GOP. Our big fight wasn't with Obama but with ourselves. Compassionate conservativism became big government conservativism even though we warned them nature abhors a paradox. They refuse to admit their errors.
But now that Palin has been reviled from within we cannot use her except as an icon. If we try to hoist her back on the national stage the media, RINOs, and dems will all crow "Palin is universally hated. Heck, half of her own party cannot stand her!" Oh how they will cluck. This is just one more example of what an abysmal president McCain would have made. Granted, he's no commie terrorist sympathizer and Joe Biden is only worthy enough to serve as his valet but McCain is a monumental ass that has been a boat-anchor in this party his whole career.
We need to rebuild our party but the McCainiacs won't let go. We must take it from them well before we turn to looking at 2010. But Palin has been forever denied us as an actual candidate. But we have her template: young, family-centered, normal careers, kids and a basic love of country that works best when it doesn't feel the need to play superhero wiht a government briefcase.
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