"Her criteria kept popping out..."

[saltpoint]

Re McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for the 2008 GOP veep nom

from

NEW YORKER magazine, Oct. 27, 2008
"The Insiders: How John McCain came to pick Sarah Palin"
by Jane Mayer


Two excerpts:

- - -

By the spring, the McCain campaign had reportedly sent scouts to Alaska to start vetting Palin as a possible running mate. A week or so before McCain named her, however, sources close to the campaign say, McCain was intent on naming his fellow-senator Joe Lieberman, an independent... . David Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, who is close to a number of McCain's top aides, told me that "McCain and Lindsey Graham" -- the South Carolina senator, who has been McCain's closest campaign companion -- "really wanted Joe." But Keene believed that "McCain was scared off" in the final days, after warnings from his advisers that choosing Lieberman would ignite a contentious floor fight at the Convention, as social conservatives revolted against Lieberman for being, among other things, prochoice.

...

With just days to go before the convention, the choices were slim. Karl Rove favored McCain's former rival Mitt Romney, but enough animus lingered from the primaries that McCain rejected the paring. "I told Romney not to wait by the phone, because 'he doesn't like you,'" Kenne, who favored the choice, said. ""With John McCain, all politics is personal." Other possible choices -- such as former Rep. Rob Portman, of Ohio, or Gov. Tim Pawlenty, of Minnesota -- seemed too conventional. They did not transmit McCain's core message that he was a "maverick." finally, McCain's top aides, including Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis, converged on Palin. Ed Rogers, the chairman of B.G.R., a well-connected, largely Republican lobbying firm, said, "Her criteria kept popping out. She was a governor -- that's good. ... In addition to Schmidt and Davis, Charles R. Black, Jr., the lobbyist and political operative who is McCain's chief campaign adviser, reportedly favored Palin. Keene said, "I'm told that Charlie Black told McCain, 'If you pick anyone else, you're going to lose. But if you pick Palin you MAY win.'" (Black did not return calls for comment.) Meanwhile, McCain's longtime friend said, "Kristol was out there shaking the pom-poms (for Palin)."


- - -

[NRaleighLiberal]

1. .. Nah, it's way too easy! N/T

[saltpoint]

2. : )

[Kookaburra]

3. Ah, criteria...

So that's what they're calling it these days.

[saltpoint]

4. Kids are just so much more sophisticated than they were back in the day.

[11 Bravo]

5. Was it a wardrobe malfunction,or did she purposefully flash her "criteria?"

[saltpoint]

6. The article is startling in that a lot of top-drawer adviser-types

thought Palin would be the right choice.

She lifted McCain for 10-14 days after the conventin in St. Paul, but following that period, she helped sink the boat.

[TheBigotBasher]

7. And now the GOP has to deal with the consequences of promoting a maverick.

How on earth does a party keep discipline if it promotes the idea of being a maverick? It simply can not. So as a consequence you have people like Gunning threatening to take their toys away if they do not do what they want.

It serves them right.

[saltpoint]

8. It is astonishing to see them implode. They assume an enormous risk for

calling for the public failure of a sitting president, and a very popular sitting president at that.

The presence of Rush Limbaugh has always been a case of the GOP at its worst, but of late his heightened role further subverts their claim to true public service.

Eight years of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld & Rice, and now right-wing talk hosts cheering the failure of the republic . . . Wow.

[TheBigotBasher]

9. Exactly

So where will Republicans who do not think that you should let the poor die in the street go?

The far right is not a home for the Republican Party if it ever wants to be electable.

[saltpoint]

13. I agree. In times past the Republicans had a few sturdy, clear souls

speaking in behalf of the public interest.

Sadly they have mostly passed on or were driven out of the party by scorched-earth fundamentalists. The names included (but were not limited to) Charles Percy of Illinois, Pete McCloskey of California, Mayor John Lindsay of New York City, and Lowell Weicker of Connecticut (who served ably on the Senate Watergate Committee), and a handful of others.

In the last generation or two, though, a more hyper-partisan (not to say dangerously rabid) Republican Party has emerged, dependent on and in bed with the fire-belching fundamentalist Far-Right Christian movement here, which seeks to repeal laws protecting women's right to choose, lesbians' and gays' rights to live and work without legal obstruction or harrassment, public funding for stem cell research, public school curricula, and a host of other cultural "imperatives."

The more loudly they rant, though, and the more distance they place between themselves and Lincoln, the less viable they become at the polls.

Obama's win was not felt to be likely two years ago. But the Republicans ran some of the most spectacularly lousy campaigns for the 110th and 111th Congresses, plus McCain's disastrous pick of Sarah Palin, and all that's left at this hour for the Republicans is to publicly call for the failure of the president.

It's kind of pitiful, actually.

[benld74]

10. HEY, SHE HAD CRITERIA?!?!?!? Yur shittin me right????

[saltpoint]

11. Hi, benld74. Well, the Republicans evidently thought she did or

pretended she did.

LOL!

I hope no one asks me to make the case, though!

[pansypoo53219]

12. she had fundie

criteria.

[saltpoint]

14. She did, and frighteningly so. The man who actually coordinated the

connection initially between Palin and the McCain camp was named Adam Brickley.

He is a self-described "Messianic Jew," and was said to be strongly drawn toward Sarah Palin because she was considered to be "among the chosen."

According to the New Yorker magazine (Oct. 27, 2008), Brickley declared that "(t)he Hand of God" played a role in choosing Palin.

He -- Brinkcly, not God -- is a graduate of the Univ. of Colorado at Colorado Springs, I think not coincidentally the home city of Jim Dobson's Focus on the Family organization.

The connection is very much hyperactive fundie Christian nutbag politics.

[Doctor_Horrible]

15. so how do we get all that "criteria" popped back in to stay for good? nt

[saltpoint]

16. A special criteria-containment committee may have to be appointed.

If Rush Limbaugh continues to publicly call for the failure of the United States government under Barack Obama, the GOP won't have any criteria left for containment.

They're not only shooting each other in the foot, but passing around their own ammo.

[Berry Cool]

17. I believe that, like everything else about her,

her "criteria" were false.

[saltpoint]

18. Yes. She was a packaged commodity from the git-go,

literally dressed up in shiny new clothes by the McCain campaign team.

She was shielded from media scrutiny, while at the same time trying to manipulate the same media into thinking she was a moose-guttin' mama from the frozen north.

Anybody who likes wolves likely won't think much of Sarah Palin, and as far as I'm concerned, they'd be on the right side of the issue in the bargain.

Go, wolves.

[yorkie]

19. She was also chosen by Dick Morris who loves feet

Anyone notice she had her toes French pedicured, she wore Naughty Monkey shoes and she did not wear hose? Was this a coincidence-I don't think so...

[saltpoint]

20. Hi, yorkie. You are dead-on correct about Dick Morris having a hand

in the selection.

From the same article referenced:

- - -

On August 1, 2007, a few weeks after the WEEKLY STANDARD cruise departed from Juneau, Palin hosted a second boatload of pundits, this time from a cruise featuring associates of the NATIONAL REVIEW. Her guests, arriving on the M.S. Noordam, included Rich Lowry, the magazine's editor and a syndicated columnist; Robert Bork, the conservative legal scholar and former federal judge; John Bolton, who served as the Bush administration's Ambassador to the United Nations from 2004 to 2006; Victor Davis Hanson, a conservative historian who is reportedly a favorite of Vice President Dick Cheney; and Dick Morris, the ideologically ambidextrous political consultant, who writes a column for The Hill and appears regularly on Fox News.

...

According to several accounts . . .no connection made that day was more meaningful than the one struck between Palin and Dick Morris. "He had this very long conversation with her," Fowler recalled. Lowry laughed in remebering it: "The joke going around was that he was going to take credit for making her."

...

In fact, in an admiring column published in the Washington POST two days after Palin was chosen, Morris wrote, "I will always remember taking her aside and telling her that she might one day be tapped to be Vice President, given her record and the shortage of female political talent in the Republican Party. She will make one hell of a candidate, and hats off to McCain for picking her."

- - -

[saltpoint]

21. Does anyone believe Palin is the likely winner in the 2012 GOP Iowa caucus?

It seems to me she may dump some cash into the effort and come up well short.