Republican political operative Nicolle Wallace served in the Bush White House and as a top aide to the John McCain 2008 presidential campaign. She’s now promoting a new novel, It’s Classified, which is about — in the words of a new Time magazine profile — “what would happen if a woman were plucked from relative obscurity and elected Vice President of the United States, only to find herself completely unprepared for the job.” As it turns out, Wallace’s fictional vice president is not just completely unprepared but seriously mentally ill. And guess who that fictional vice president is based on?
“The idea of a mentally ill vice president who suffers in complete isolation was obviously sparked by the behaviors I witnessed by Sarah Palin,” Wallace tells Time. “What if somebody who was ill-equipped for the office were to ascend to the presidency or vice presidency? What would they do? How long would it take for people to figure it out? I became consumed by this question.”
It’s not surprising that Wallace would choose a public forum to portray Palin in such a negative light. (And, as it happens, at a time when Palin is again in the news, announcing Wednesday afternoon that she will not run for president in 2012.) Wallace’s name was near the center of post-campaign speculation about unhappiness with Palin within the McCain team. But now, Wallace has added a new and striking element to the story: She says the McCain team discussed the question of whether, if McCain had won the 2008 election, it would have been “appropriate” for Palin to actually take office.
“There certainly were discussions — not for long because of the arc the campaign took — but certainly there were discussions about whether, if McCain were to win, it would be appropriate for her to be sworn in,” Wallace tells Time.
It’s not clear what the McCain team had in mind. (I’ve sent a note to Wallace asking for more details.) The vice presidency is a constitutional position, and once elected, the president cannot fire the vice president. If McCain wanted to be rid of Palin, he would have had to do that before the election, not after. Of course, as Wallace suggests, the question became moot after the economic crisis hit and McCain’s mishandling of events led to a fatal decline in the polls. But the idea that a presidential nominee’s aides were discussing whether to somehow push an elected vice-president out of office is remarkable.
UPDATE 1: I just spoke with Charlie Black, who was McCain’s top campaign adviser in the 2008 race. “I never heard any such discussions,” Black told me. “There were no discussions like that with McCain, or I think I would have known about them. That doesn’t mean some subset of the senior staff might have talked to each other about it.”
As for the constitutional issues involved with blocking an elected vice-president from taking the oath of office, Black said, “Whoever was having that discussion, if there was one, didn’t have a good lawyer in the group.”
UPDATE 2: Wallace herself has not responded to email and phone messages for comment. But Lisa Sciambra, a publicist at Wallace’s publishing house, Atria Books, did respond. Sciambra says she passed on my questions to Wallace, who declined to answer. So Sciambra wrote: “The article makes clear that her real life in politics inspired many aspects of [previous book] Eighteen Acres and It’s Classified, which she hopes you’ll read for yourself and enjoy. As she said in the Time interview, she sought to infuse her characters with the concern she felt as she watched Sarah Palin go through extreme highs and lows on the campaign trail. That concern influenced decisions such as the one to remove Palin from the campaign trail for debate prep, but as she states in her interview with Time, she didn’t set out to build a case against Palin in either of her novels.”
I asked Sciambra again to please pass on a few questions to Wallace: “a) what specific concerns led whoever was in the discussions to conclude that it might not be appropriate for a vice president-elect to be sworn in, and b) whether there were any discussions about how that might actually be done, given the constitutional problems involved. Was there a contingency plan?”
Sciambra answered: “No further comment other than what was passed along.”
