A report in the Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London suggests that John McCain and Sarah Palin are on the outs:
If McCain wins, Vice Pres. Palin will owe her position just a 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency to Rove. If McCain loses, Rove will once again be the “brain” masterminding the ascendancy of the GOP’s next rising star.
With his electoral prospects fading by the day, Senator John McCain has fallen out with his vice-presidential running mate about the direction of his White House campaign.
McCain has become alarmed about the fury unleashed by Sarah Palin, the moose-hunting “pitbull in lipstick,” against Senator Barack Obama. Cries of “terrorist” and “kill him” have accompanied the tirades by the governor of Alaska against the Democratic nominee at Republican rallies.
Mark Salter, McCain’s long-serving chief of staff, is understood to have told campaign insiders that he would prefer his boss, a former Vietnam prisoner of war, to suffer an “honourable defeat” rather than conduct a campaign that would be out of character — and likely to lose him the election.
Not only is McCain unhappy with the tenor of Palin’s attacks on Obama, the Times says he has prevented her from going after Obama on his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Palin is disgruntled with the leadership of the campaign, the paper says. She objected to the decision to withdraw from Michigan, and her advice to McCain to “take the gloves off” in the second debate was ignored.
A “leading Republican consultant” tells the Times that the source of friction between McCain and Palin is Palin’s ambitions:
“Sarah Palin is no fool. She sees the same thing and wants to salvage what she can. She is positioning herself for the future. Her best days could be in front of her. She wants to look as though she was the fighter, the person with the spunk who was out there taking it to the Democrats.”
Palin would prefer to be vice president, no doubt, but even if her ticket loses, she is in position to come up a winner. She will leapfrog the GOP old-boy hierarchy to become both the party’s leader during Obama’s first term and the odds-on favorite to be the GOP nominee in 2012.
The fact that a pol with such eerie similarities to George Bush — a meagerly gifted energy-state governor with a stunted intellect and a Christian nationalist ideology — has been maneuvered into position to become the nation’s next top Republican raises questions anew about Karl Rove’s role in Palin’s selection.
Can it be an accident that at the moment Bush is slouching back to Texas, Rove, the symbiot, finds a new host — an empty-headed pol who is every bit as craven, incurious and, most importantly, malleable as Bush? It makes sense on the surface: Making kings (or queens) is what kingmakers do.
Among those who believe there is truth behind the rumors in August that Role played puppet master in Palin’s selection is Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi:
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