Both Politico and HuffPo are reporting that Governor Palin, increasingly frustrated and dismayed by the McCain campaign's restrictive handling, has begun to stray off the reservation and speak her own mind, relying on her own "instincts" rather than the former Bush handlers assigned to her.
Read the entire article by Ben Smith at Politico:
http://www.politico.com/...
The other night, I remember laughing as I saw Palin ignore her handlers "thank you. thank you" as they tried to get her to shut up and stop talking to reporters. Apparently, I wasn't the only one who noticed that she seemed to have taken the bit in her mouth and decided she truly had "nothing to lose" by changing this from the McCain/Palin ticket to the Palin pitch for 2012.
HuffPo http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
analyzes the Politico piece, and confirms that Palin has "gone rogue" on McCain.
Here are a few choice quotes from Politico (emphasis my own), where Smith suggests that Palin's insurgency is "complicating the campaign's already-tense internal dynamics."
Palin's decision to forge her own trail appears to be both an attempt to portray herself more positively in an attempt to shore up her chances for 2012, as well as an attempt to shield herself from the attacks that are coming from within the campaign, as some people are out to "shred" her performance as the cause of McCain's demise.
Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline.
"She's lost confidence in most of the people on the plane," said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to "go rogue" in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.
"I think she'd like to go more rogue," he said.
Palin represents the darling of the far right, and the conflict between her and the McCain campaign mirrors the struggle within the Republican party for the party's soul (an oxymoron if I ever heard one). But assuming the Republican party has a soul, apparently it is conflicted between those who want to go back to the more "moderate" intellectual ideals of people like Buckley and Goldwater, and those who want to veer even further to the right, and throw out any intellectually rigorous discipline as "elitist" and eggheadish, and rely more on the "gut instinct" that drove GWB and that, apparently, drives Palin.
We all have seen the results of the mind-set that says "I have a direct line to God, and I don't need to know anything else." Palin and Bush are two of the same, and we can only hope that the McCain campaign's demise shreds Palin's credibility as well. In any event, it's great to see them turning on each other.
"These people are going to try and shred her after the campaign to divert blame from themselves," a McCain insider said, referring to McCain's chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, and to Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush aide who has taken a lead role in Palin's campaign. Palin's partisans blame Wallace, in particular, for Palin's avoiding of the media for days and then giving a high-stakes interview to CBS News' Katie Couric, the sometimes painful content of which the campaign allowed to be parceled out over a week.
Apparently, though, other McCain aides feel Palin was not mishandled, but that she was simply "unready." They believe she was wrong to urge McCain to bring up the Rev. Wright issue. Although she handled some of her moments well (the RNC debut, and the VP debate) [ugh,],
other elements of her image-making went catastrophically awry. Her dodging of the press and her nervous reliance on tight scripts in her first interview, with ABC News, became a national joke — driven home to devastating effect by "Saturday Night Live" comic Tina Fey. The Couric interview — her only unstaged appearance for a week — was "water torture," as one internal ally put it.
Palin partisans apparently believe she chafed at the handling:
"Her strategy was to be trustworthy and a team player during the convention and thereafter, but she felt completely mismanaged and mishandled and ill advised," the person said. "Recently, she's gone from relying on McCain advisers who were assigned to her to relying on her own instincts."
Apparently, Palin was furious about the clothing issue that consumed much of the last week's media focus, and fears she will be unable to repair her image.
But few imagine that Palin will be able to repair her image — and bad poll numbers — in the eleven days before the campaign ends. And the final straw for Palin and her allies was the news that the campaign had reported spending $150,000 on her clothes, turning her, again, into the butt of late-night humor.
"She never even set foot in these stores," the senior Republican said, noting Palin hadn't realized the cost when the clothes were brought to her in her Minnesota hotel room.
"It's completely out-of-control operatives," said the close ally outside the campaign. "She has no responsibility for that. It's incredibly frustrating for us and for her."