Inside Sarah Palin's brain

[John Richard Clinton Maenpaa]

Inside Sarah Palin's brain

I've peeked at "Game Change," the new anonymous quotefest on the '08 presidential campaign by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Do I have to read the whole thing? I know it has saucy bits that we're supposed to gobble up, but some of them (like the dysfunction and discord within the John Edwards campaign) just make me wince.

Also, parts of it are maddening. John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin may have been a bold stroke that narrowed what would otherwise have been a blowout defeat. But it was also, as the authors depict it, an act of extreme recklessness, a seat-of-the-pants improvisation that allowed for almost no serious vetting of someone who knew diddly-squat about the world we live in and who would have been a heartbeat from the presidency.

"In the days leading up to an interview with ABC News' Charlie Gibson, aides were worried with Ms. Palin's grasp of facts. She couldn't explain why North and South Korea were separate nations and she did not know what the Federal Reserve did. She also said she believed Saddam Hussein attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001."

Where'd they find her? Well, on the Internet, as it happens. "McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, spotted Sarah Palin while searching the Internet for possible female vice presidential candidates." More from CBS News:

"Her foreign policy tutors are literally taking her through, 'This is World War I, this is World War II, this is the Korean War. This is the how the Cold War worked.' Steve Schmidt had gone to them and said, 'She knows nothing,'" Heilemann told Cooper. "A week later, after the convention was over, she still didn't really understand why there was a North Korea and a South Korea. She was still regularly saying that Saddam Hussein had been behind 9/11. And, literally, the next day her son was about to ship off to Iraq. And when they asked her who her son was going to fight, she couldn't explain that."

Skimming the book, one passage jumped out: The account of White House meeting of President Bush, Barack Obama, McCain, Nancy Pelosi and other top officials during the financial crisis of September 2008. Obama, the authors write, all but ran the meeting, even though McCain had sought it. McCain said nothing for 45 minutes and then had little that was helpful to contribute. It's impossible to know who is channeling the story to the authors, since it's all anonymous, but it seems to me that Bush was one of the sources (or Rove, Bush's brain?) and that he gave McCain some payback for all the guff McCain gave him over the years.

One Republican in the room mused silent, If you closed your eyes and changed everyones' voices, you would have thought Obama was the president of the United States. [p. 388]

... Bush was dumbfounded by McCain's behavior. He'd forced Bush to hold a meeting that the president saw as pointless -- and then sat there like a bump on a log. Unconstructive, thought Bush. Unclear. Ineffectual. [p. 389]

By Joel Achenbach | January 11, 2010; 12:39 PM ET

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/achenblog/2010/01/inside_sarah_pal...