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Palin: Are there any friends left?
Washington Examiner
06/30/09 12:10 AM EDT
Writing in this month’s Vanity Fair, Todd Purdum catalogs just how rapidly Sarah Palin has burned through friends and confidantes.
Walter Hickel, the former Alaska governor who chaired Palin’s gubernatorial campaign in 2006, told Purdum, “I don’t give a damn what she does.”
And John Bitney, a junior-high school friend and former legislative liaison for Palin, said, “I find it’s frustrating dealing with Sarah, because it seems we’re always dealing with emotional crap, and we never seem to be able to focus on the business at hand. Check my feet for horseshoes if I have to sit there and listen to another talk show.”
Purdum also catalogs just how rapidly Palin has burned her bridges. By the end of the campaign, he writes, several aides to her running-mate John McCain — Steve Schmidt, Nicolle Wallace and Tucker Eskew — “were barely on speaking terms with her.”
In fact, Purdum writes, the campaign searched for a calming figure who could function as Palin’s “horse whisperer,” and they settled on Mark McKinnon. Aide Mark Salter said the McCain camp picked McKinnon because “[y]ou sort of want a guy who’s very easygoing, gives good advice and doesn’t add to the natural nervousness.”
Purdum also digs up a bit more on the charge that Palin loaded her own concession speech into the Teleprompter on election night without telling McCain’s staff. The McCain aides explained to her that running mates did not traditionally give concession speeches. “Are those John’s wishes?” she asked. They told her that they were, but in disbelief she brought it to McCain himself, who gave her the same answer.
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