There was grumbling that Palin had jumped the gun by bringing up [William] Ayers at her rallies before the campaign could properly do the groundwork with a rollout strategy and ads. (At one rally, she had talked about Obama “palling around with terrorists.") Palin was mad at her handlers. Reportedly, she felt that [Nicole] Wallace and [Steve] Schmidt had poorly coached and advised her. One adviser later speculated that she impulsively talked about Ayers because she felt thwarted—she had really wanted to bring up the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. (Actually, Palin was feeling hurt and angry over the tabloid treatment of her 17-year-old daughter Bristol, and decided—on her own—that Ayers should be fair game. McCain’s advisers were working on a strategy that would launch an Ayers attack the following week, but McCain had not signed off on it, and [Mark] Salter was resisting.)
A lot of folks have been chattering about how Palin “jumped the gun” on the Ayers rollout with the implication being that she went “rogue” because she felt McCain’s advisers weren’t being politically aggressive enough, but the video interview with Newsweek‘s Katie Connolly at their site sheds light on the real reason Palin brought up Ayers earlier than planned:
“She was feeling very betrayed by what happened with her daughter and having seeing her daughter Bristol splashed across all of the tabloids because of her pregnancy and when her email account got hacked she found that incredibly difficult to deal with and Bristol Palin started getting awful emails and text messages from random strangers about her pregnancy. Palin herself was feeling that if her family can become under this sort of attack why can’t we bring up some of Barack Obama’s associations?”
Here’s the video. The relevant portion starts at about the 45 second mark, including some additional insight from Evan Thomas:
In short, Palin was frustrated about occurrences the Obama campaign had nothing to do with and she lashed out at Barack to make herself feel better. That’s a classic example of anger displacement and not the kind of behavior you’d like to see from a vice presidential candidate. America dodged a bigass bullet keeping this spiteful ignoramus one heartbeat away from the presidency. We all know she doesn’t have the necessary intellect for the job, but it should be fairly obvious after this revelation that she doesn’t possess a modicum of the required temperament either.
you think she and Levi are still gonna get hitched?
shit yeah - ‘marriage is a sacred bond between two unwilling teenagers’ !!!! dios mio…
I wonder whom she aught to have been mad at for subjecting her daughter to world-wide scrutiny at such a delicate time… hmmmm....?
Comment by missmira on 11/08/08 at 06:25 PM
I watched the video of her with back home with the reporters and she went on about how wronged she was by the false accusations about continents, countries, and clothes. She whined about how hard it is to defend yourself against false accusations. Told the press they needed to do their job better to dig out the truth. Nope, not a hint of irony that she had just spent a few months smearing Obama as an associate of terrorists. Maybe she could look to him as an example of how to deal with such falsities.
you think she and Levi are still gonna get hitched?
I’m thinking they will, because let’s face it, Palin still wants to run in 2012.
My favorite story about Palin is the story Nick Carney told in Salon about her basketball days. She’s just not a good person, she never has been. I believe she and her family did go on a shopping spree; I believe that during the McCain campaign, she had only herself in mind.
Please note that they aren’t mad that she mentioned Ayers, they are mad because she mentioned him too soon.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen a woman accused of premature ejaculation.
Palin herself was feeling that if her family can become under this sort of attack why can’t we bring up some of Barack Obama’s associations?
Uh. Because the National Enquirer wasn’t running for president?
So here we have a person who starts lashing out in any direction when life gets difficult. Sure, yeah. That would have been great if she wound up in the Oval Office. “Waaah, someone sent Todd a nasty note so I’m going to invade Iran!”
The really sad thing is that Obama went above and beyond in the Bristol case: not only did he reiterate that he thought families and children should be off-limits, but he also pointed out that his mother was 18 when he was born, so people shouldn’t be so quick to judge teen mothers.
Not that there was ever any doubt, but the Senator from the State of Grace beat out the forces of small-minded pettiness.
Comment by Kerry Reid on 11/09/08 at 12:29 AM
This woman is a nasty piece of work whose default option is attack. Add that to the impossibility of her drawing logical conclusions out of her tangled mass of neurons, and her relentless ambition. Bristol’s travails with the tabloids and hackers were just an excuse for her Mom to do what comes naturally: smear someone. (With relish. Sorry.)
The only novelty was that Obama wasn’t a mentor of hers first. My favorite story of Sarah sticking it to a mentor is when she ran for Mayor against the man who introduced her to the Wasilla city council. His wife kept her maiden name, and Sarah smeared them as not being married; they actually had to produce their marriage certificate. (Sound familiar?)
