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Sarah Palin's Last Minute Strategy

October 25, 2008

Politico reports that tensions between the Palin and McCain camps are rising during these final weeks of the campaign. There are also reports that Palin is off the reservation and is ignoring her talking points, putting forth her own opinions.

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.

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Between Palin's internal detractors and her allies, there's a middle ground: Some aides say that she's a flawed candidate whose handling exaggerated her weak spots. "She was completely mishandled in the beginning. No one took the time to look at what her personal strengths and weaknesses are and developed a plan that made sense based on who she is as a candidate," the aide said. "Any concerns she or those close to her have about that are totally valid." But the aide said that Palin's inexperience led her to her own mistakes: "How she was handled allowed her weaknesses to hang out in full display."

Palin has been talking more to reporters lately, but it's hard to see how she can make up for past mistakes at this late date. The current electoral map has Obama winning in a virtual landslide. The minute the economic crisis hit, it became very clear that Mitt Romney would have been the better VP pick.

Mitt is smart, he understands finance and economic policy: the campaign could have put him front and center from the first day. He could speak fluently about economic policy without needing to study up the night before and could have had daily press conferences during the time that Congress was dithering around on the bailout package. Instead the McCain camp had Sarah Palin, who is so out of her depth on economic matters it's shocking. That was a major misstep by the McCain campaign, and probably sealed the deal for Obama.

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