Surrounding Herself with Amateurs Has Put Palin’s Future in Jeopardy

Here’s a little bipartisanship for you. I, a bona fide member of the unprofessional left, agree with Jennifer Rubin, a conservative columnist for the rightward-tilting Washington Post op-ed page and who until recently wrote for right-wing Commentary magazine, that Sarah Palin is facing a career crisis of her own making, and that the crisis is a result of her decision to surround herself with amateurs and sycophants rather than seasoned political pros. Rubin writes:

It has been reported that that she is exceedingly insulated from experienced voices by a mini-staff in Alaska and her husband … A case in point is:

Rebecca Mansour who especially personifies the amorphous yet fervid network of Palin World. Mansour said . . . “I majored in English and history and minored in philosophy, but I’ve never been a Beltway person, so that does confuse people.”

And this person is “Palin’s primary speechwriter, researcher, online communications coordinator and all-purpose adviser.”

It was Mansour who went on a righty radio show hosted by former liberal (and current gay Stockholm-syndrome victim) Tammy Bruce last weekend to road test a new lie about the infamous crosshairs map Palin’s camp released last spring on which Giffords’ district was targeted, along with 19 others:

MANSOUR: I just want to clarify again, and maybe it wasn’t done on the record enough by us when this came out, the graphic, is just, it’s basically — we never, ever, ever intended it to be gunsights. It was simply crosshairs like you see on maps.

BRUCE: Well, it’s a surveyor’s symbol. It’s a surveyor’s symbol.

MANSOUR: It’s a surveyor’s symbol. I just want to say this, Tammy, if I can. This graphic was done, not even done in house — we had a political graphics professional who did this for us.

Leaving aside the fact that Palin herself referred to it as her “bullseye map” — and as a former creative director, I promise you that that map was approved by the client before it was released — the point is that what’s important here is not the map’s iconography.

It is becoming clear that Jared Loughner was under the sway of the right-wing, anti-government rhetoric Palin, Glenn Beck and their ilk have spewed nonstop since George Bush left town, but no one thinks Sarah Palin’s crosshairs map drove Loughner to try to kill Rep. Giffords.

The point, as I’ve said before, is that releasing the map — and marketing it with a tweet encouraging her angry, gun-obsessed followers to “RELOAD’ — was strictly from amateur. A political professional would have warned Palin that if one of the House members on the map were to be shot, she would surely find herself in the position she’s in now: forced off message and onto defense, and watching as her viability as a candidate slips away.

Rubin continues:

Many of [Palin’s] gaffes, I would argue, would be preventable if she and her husband didn’t essentially run the entire operation…

So you have episodes like the release of the video today that simply reinforce the impression that she is undisciplined, rash and unserious. But most of all, her excessive reliance on her own and her husband’s political antennae are proving to be her undoing. Well, you ask, doesn’t that mean she lacks the judgment to be president? That’s precisely what many conservatives are pondering these days, when they don’t get distracted by the chaos she creates in her wake.

The timing of Palin’s speech, releasing it before Pres. Obama spoke at the memorial service in Tucson, was obviously an attempt to out-maneuver the president and put Palin and Obama on split-screen parity.

Team Palin apparently convinced themselves that Palin’s speech, which was, at its essence, all about her and her contempt for her critics, would trump the president’s memorial address. But even political amateurs could have predicted that the president’s message would not be about him or, certainly, Palin, but a call for solace for the victims and for healing, comity and unity in the country.

Experienced professionals would have known that whatever Palin did, it could never compete with the White House on presentation and stage management — and even the rank amateurs around her should have warned her about her tone. Apparently Palin, like a lot of unstable people who become celebrities, has surrounded herself with people who are terrified to tell her “no.”

In presidential campaigns, it is a truism that the selection of a running mate is the most important decision a candidate makes. In choosing Sarah Palin — a decision made with virtually no vetting — Sen. John McCain proved that he was not fit to be president.

Similarly, by surrounding herself with amateurs, with yes men and yes women, Palin only has herself to blame for the situation she is. And remember that it’s not just her political career that is at stake. The moment it becomes the consensus among independent voters, Republicans and the GOP’s establishment-media lapdogs that Palin is unelectable, her book deals and perhaps even her cushy, phone-it-in, talking-head job on Fox, go out the window.

Everything about that speech was bad — the bitter, scolding tone, the uninspired writing, the tone-deaf, divisive messaging and, especially, the stilted, barely restrained resentment in Palin’s delivery.

But the ultimate symbol of Team Palin’s sloppy amateurism in the speech was the bright light reflected on both lenses of Palin’s glasses.

In the ultra-controlled environment in which the video was produced, what that reflection indicates is that either no one noticed the distracting glare on Palin’s glasses during the entire eight minutes or they noticed but didn’t care enough to fix it.

This not-ready-for-cable-access sloppiness jives with my other favorite symbol of Palin’s amateurism: Her attacks on Pres. Obama’s use of teleprompters. Throughout 2009, her people sent her out to goad Obama repeatedly about telemprompter abuse knowing full well that Palin, whose only real training is as a sportscaster, is as reliant on them as anyone — and here at Pensito, we have the photos to prove it.

The reflection on her glasses comes from a light positioned too close to her face, not a teleprompter — even though, based on her delivery, it’s clear she was reading from a prompter — but we are nonetheless adding a screenshot from the speech into our collection of photos depicting Palin’s teleprompter obsession.