A lot has been made of Sarah Palin's prior membership in the Alaska Independence Party, and for excellent reasons that have been well diaried elsewhere.
We might be missing a major question, though: was she, in fact, ever a member of the party?
The McCain campaign says no, below the fold:
Responding to an ABC News report that Sarah Palin was once a member of the AIP, the McCain camp gets a little testy:
While the press scrambles to report on the process by which Governor Palin was offered the second spot on the Republican ticket, New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller has opted instead to make up her own version of events. As the AP reports, "Sarah Palin voluntarily told John McCain's campaign about her pregnant teenage daughter and her husband's 2-decade-old DUI arrest during questioning as part of the Republican's vice presidential search, the lawyer who conducted the background review said." Yet according to Bumiller, yesterday's disclosures "called into question" how thoroughly Governor Palin had been vetted. Why the discrepancy? It seems one reporter actually reported the story, while Bumiller made up her own.
The AP quotes Steve Schmidt saying the campaign was prepared to send a "jump team" to the home state of whoever was selected for the second spot. But Bumiller has her own version: "A Republican with ties to the campaign said the team assigned to vet Ms. Palin in Alaska had not arrived there until Thursday, a day before Mr. McCain stunned the political world with his vice-presidential choice." A Republican with ties to the campaign? How about a Republican on the campaign? It's not as though the leadership of this campaign was unwilling or unable to talk to the New York Times, in fact, they were already on the record answering these questions.
And Bumiller writes that Governor Palin "was a member for two years in the 1990s of the Alaska Independence Party." Not true, and unsourced. Governor Palin has been a registered Republican since 1982.
Sounds like a showdown in the making...or perhaps just another he said/she said storyline. On one side: the libertarian (to an extreme) AIP, proudly claiming Sarah Palin as one of their own. On the other: Palin herself, denying any such affiliation.
This one should be easy to either knock down or retract.