Sarah Palin, future of the GOP, part 2

The New York Times dumped a big pile of ashes in the cold, lumpy oatmeal of the newly chastened Republican Party yesterday with their insider story-laced postmortem on the internal relations within the McCain-Palin campaign.

Choice tidbits include the revelation that Palin's wardrobe budget was pegged by the McCain campaign was in the $20K to $25K range -- rather than the whopping $150,000 bill that Palin ended up running up with the GOP credit card:

Instead, in a public relations debacle undermining Ms. Palin’s image as an everywoman “hockey mom,” bills came in to the Republican National Committee for about $150,000, including charges of $75,062 at Neiman Marcus and $49,425 at Saks Fifth Avenue. The bills included clothing for Ms. Palin’s family and purchases of shoes, luggage and jewelry, the advisers said.

The advisers described the McCain campaign as incredulous about the shopping spree and said Republican National Committee lawyers were likely to go to Alaska to conduct an inventory and try to account for all that was spent.

The Palin crowd, for its part, is sticking with the RNC made them do it story they whipped up when the bloated fashion budget hit the news:

Ms. Palin has defended her wardrobe as the idea of the Republican National Committee and said that she would give it back.

“Those clothes, they are not my property,” she said. “Just like the lighting and the staging and everything else that the R.N.C. purchased.”

Then there was the middling-to-bad Charles Gibson interview and the far more disastrous Katie Couric interview, during which Palin made deers frozen in 18 wheeler headlights seem positively in command, by comparison.

Palin was supposed to be boning up but instead hit the ground stumbling and was soon tumbling, on camera, head over designer high heels in a slow motion horror show interview that was painful and embarrassing to watch, even for the ever-growing legions of Palin-haters.

It was, however, manna from heaven to the satirists at Saturday Night Live who were able to draw huge laughs with a largely verbatim reconstruction of sections of the interview, with Palin-double Tina Fey doing an eerily spot on impression.

Sensing, no doubt, that Palin's over the top exuberance, camera mugging, and goofy winking schtick was already maxed out, Fey seemed almost more restrained than her model, making the comedy bit a viral hit as split-screen comparisons between the real thing and the Memorex-moment Fey performance popped up in news commentaries and online videos. [Indeed, this writer initially skipped over the Fey clip at first while looking for it, thinking at first he was simply seeing a section of the actual interview.]


According to the Times, though, it was a prank call that Palin took -- without ever catching on despite broad comedic touches including an outlandishly exaggerated accent and way too personal banter -- from comedian Marc-Antoine Audette.

Ms. Palin appeared to believe that she was talking to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, even though the prankster had a flamboyant French accent and spoke to her in a more personal way than would be protocol in such a call. At one point, he told Ms. Palin that she would make a good president some day. “Maybe in eight years,” she replied.

The whole time, according to McCain insiders, the Palin inner circle was leaking self-serving information to Palin-supporter William Kristol of the right wing attack journal, the Weekly Standard (never any sort of friend to McCain, to be sure), causing the firing of Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s top foreign policy expert, who had briefed Palin for the VP debate and was seen to have secretly shifted alliance to the Palin cabal -- or not -- depending on just who in the discombobulated McCain campaign you're prepared to believe:

As a result, two senior members of the McCain campaign said on Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had been fired from the campaign in its final days. But Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager, and Mr. Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, said Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had in fact not been dismissed. Mr. Scheunemann, who picked up the phone in his office at McCain campaign headquarters on Wednesday afternoon, responded that “anybody who says I was fired is either lying or delusional or a whack job.”

Mr. Scheunemann was referring to widely disseminated criticism by Mr. McCain’s advisers in the final days of the campaign that Ms. Palin, as first reported in Politico, was a “whack job.”

Lying? Delusional? Whack job?

What?

In the McCain campaign?

Say it ain't so...