Future of the GOP, part 3: Wasilla Hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus

It just keeps coming. In addition to the revelations discussed in the previous post, we're getting more tidbits from all over. ABC News has collected a few choice bits:

Fox News reports that Palin didn't know Africa was a continent and did not know the member nations of the North American Free Trade Agreement -- the United States, Mexico and Canada -- when she was picked for vice president.

Several publications say she irked the McCain campaign by asking to make her own concession speech on election night.

On this latter, we refer back to the NY Times piece quoted in our previous post:

As late as Tuesday night, a McCain adviser said, Ms. Palin was pushing to deliver her own speech just before Mr. McCain’s concession speech, even though vice-presidential nominees do not traditionally speak on election night. But Ms. Palin met up with Mr. McCain with text in hand. She was told no by Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, and Steve Schmidt, Mr. McCain’s top strategist.

ABC also mentions the Republican National Committee lawyers headed up to Alaska to try to determine how and why Palin and her family ran up that $150,000 wardrobe bill, citing the Times as well as a Newsweek investigation:

A Republican donor who agreed to foot a majority of the expenses was stunned when he received the bill, Newsweek reported. Both the Times and Newsweek report that the budget for the clothing was expected to be between $20,000 and $25,000. Instead, the amount reported by the Republican National Committee was $150,000.

But it gets better -- or worse, depending on your point of view:

That wasn't the whole tab, however, according to Newsweek. The magazine claims that Palin leaned on some low-level staffers to put thousands of dollars of additional purchases on their credit cards. The national committee and McCain became aware of the extra expenditures, including clothes for husband Todd Palin, when the staffers sought reimbursement, Newsweek reported.

But wait -- there's more:

There is one comment in particular from a McCain aide that guaranteed to heighten friction between the two camps. The angry aide described the Palin family shopping spree to Newsweek as "Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast."

Where were the pithy one liners like that during the campaign?


The stylistic differences between McCain and the self-declared future of the GOP could hardly have been starker on Wednesday, according to ABC:

McCain drove himself home in a Toyota sport utility vehicle. Palin's departure was a grander event. She left with an entourage of 18 family members and friends and a Secret Service detail, heading to the airport in a motorcade stretching more than a dozen vehicles, flanked by a dozen more cops on motorcycles.

One last tidbit from Newsweek's print edition, as reported by the UK's Times Online:

The magazine also claims that at the GOP convention in St. Paul, when [McCain] aides Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter went to her hotel room to brief her, Ms Palin walked into the room wearing only a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat to Todd, adding: "I'll be just a minute."

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...

All is fair in love, war, and politics? I think not...

For a few minutes, I was shamed by the implicit spirit of magnanimous forgiveness and inclusiveness in Barack Obama's acceptance speech in Chicago.

It was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to hear. It was the sort of thing I expected him to say when I voted for him -- and his apparently entirely genuine desire to work with those who oppose him is one of the things I admire most about him.

But... on sober reflection... there are things in the wake of this election that must be said.

And perhaps it must fall, at least in part, to people like me -- a disaffected, former Republican, someone who, once, was proud to support and vote for John McCain -- to say them.

This election does speak volumes about the genuine American spirit: open-mindedness, a willingness to see the other side, a willing to change deep habits of thinking, a falling of old stereotypes about all of us, of all colors and religions.


But voters were misled repeatedly, lies were told -- and told again and again , divisions -- racial, social, and religious -- were wedged open in the most egregiously cynical attempts to divide and conquer, an avalanche of dirty tricks and outlandish last minute campaign lies seemed in danger of burying the election -- sometimes with the active help of local election officials.

These lies, these tricks, this exploitation of fear and racial animosity was not just directed at Barack Obama and his supporters.

Their real target was the very heart of American democracy.

Of course, it didn't start with the McCain campaign. Racial triangulation, divide-and-conquer strategies played an important part in the primary and almost succeeded in sidelining the Obama candidacy in the primaries as a once-formidable political machine seemed to all but destroy itself using old tactics trying to attack its newest enemy.

The vile tactics engaged in by the worst elements opposing Barack Obama were outrageous and often self-defeating. But they were not limited to any one political machine or the most extreme elements. In the general election, officials of the Republican Party engaged in a raft of illegal -- and despicable -- dirty tricks, intentional misinformation of voters, and open intimidation and outright thuggery all played a role in the GOP effort to suppress the vote and defeat their opponents.

Exaggeration, misinformation, and outright lies were a hallmark of the McCain camplaign and even John McCain himself repeated outlandish and disreputable lies over and over. John McCain is a man I was once proud to contribute to and vote for. But he disgraced himself, the party, and his former supporters.

I plan to forgive.

But none of us should forget...

GOP dirty tricks reach historic highs -- and depths

Campaign crunch time dirty tricks are at an all time high, according to voting rights experts contacted by the Associated Press -- and the Republican Party or their allies seem to be behind most of them:

Associated Press: 'Tis the season for tricking voters