Do political operatives think we have no memory at all? The Vanity Fair piece everyone is linking, but I won't, is as much about rehabilitating John McCain and his political operatives, as it is trying to sacrifice Palin in the cause. John McCain himself blew any chance he had of becoming President when he collapsed around the economic stimulus package. That's when his numbers went down through the floor. You do remember that fiasco of his own making, I trust? And Palin more than held her own versus Biden in the debates, while McCain was repeatedly hung out to dry by Obama.
In the town-hall setting, Obama understood that the television audience was the real audience. He mostly stayed at his stool and looked into the camera. McCain wandered about the stage looking down at the crowd and gave every appearance to the home audience of being lost. In the final debate, Obama savaged McCain on economics and McCain didn't even respond. Now these are the same people who let it out that McCain was uncomfortable discussing economics in the middle of a financial collapse, yet it's Sarah Palin's fault that he lost? What a bunch of nonsense.
Finally, VP nominees don't win, or lose races. That advice is as old as presidential politics itself. And the worst kind of politics is all the Vanity Fair item can possibly be. Evidently McCain, or at least his closest advisers, don't want people remembering 2008 for what it was - a complete failure as a presidential candidate on the part of John McCain.
I spotted a revealing bit of wisdom from the Vanity Fair article on Palin at Hotline On Call. See below.
Apparently there's a 10,000 word opus on Sarah Palin in Vanity Fair. I didn't read it and am not going to bother. I saw McCain's people mentioned via Memeorandum. What? They didn't do enough damage to the GOP with that crummy campaign they strung together?
Read Geraghty and, or Kristol, or someone else. As for this below - even if it were accurate, we're honestly supposed to believe Biden is executive material? What would these same people be writing if they had him on a ticket and lost? Palin did more to help McCain with money, enthusiasm and crowds, despite his not even allowing her to assume the traditional attack dog role that is the task of every VP nominee. John McCain blew any chance he had himself and wouldn't let anyone attack his challenger, even when they had every right to do so, as with Reverend Wright. Evidently those closest to McCain need someone besides McCain, or themselves to blame. It's pathetic and sad.
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."
Better? What, the next John McCain? No thanks. I'll pass. We've seen more than enough of him already over his years as a politician.
