The circular firing squad within the McCain camp is blasting away this weekend. In stories on CNN and Politico, Palin aides are reporting that "Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image" -- while McCain aides denounce Palin as a "diva" and openly blame her for dragging the ticket down.
In the CNN story, the ferocity of McCain aides' takedown of Palin is stunning. The mildest complaint is that "Palin has gone off-message several times, and [McCain aides] privately wonder whether the incidents were deliberate." One aide gets more personal with an all-out character attack:
"She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone," said this McCain adviser. "She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else.
"Also, she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: Divas trust only unto themselves, as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom."
Politico reports that Palin, for her part,
"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.
(Would she do so in a manner different from her onetime "rogue employee" Walt Monegan? Or that rogue cop, Mike Wooten?)
Of course, Palin is not without allies in the disintegrating campaign. They paint her rebellion as self defense:
"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.
After the campaign? Palin should be so lucky. McCain aides are already going after her competence as well as her character (back to CNN here):
But two sources, one Palin associate and one McCain adviser, defended the decision to keep her press interaction limited after she was picked, both saying flatly that she was not ready and that the missteps could have been a lot worse.
They insisted that she needed time to be briefed on national and international issues and on McCain's record.
"Her lack of fundamental understanding of some key issues was dramatic," another McCain source familiar with prepping Palin told CNN, saying it was probably the "hardest" to get her "up to speed than any candidate in history."
Of course, the impossibility task of shielding a completely unprepared nominee from vetting while trying to accomplish months' worth of briefing in a few days was fully predictable - in fact, fully predicted, by presidential campaign veteran James Fallows, back on August 29:
Let's assume that Sarah Palin is exactly as smart and disciplined as Barack Obama. But instead of the year and a half of nonstop campaigning he has behind him, and Joe Biden's even longer toughening-up process, she comes into the most intense period of the highest stakes campaign with absolutely zero warmup or preparation. If she has ever addressed an international issue, there's no evidence of it in internet-land.
The smartest person in the world could not prepare quickly enough to know the pitfalls, and to sound confident while doing so, on all the issues she will be forced to address. This is long before she gets to a debate with Biden; it's what the press is going to start out looking for.
So the prediction is: unavoidable gaffes. The challenge for the McCain-Palin campaign is to find some way to defuse them ahead of time, since Socrates, Machiavelli, and Clausewitz reincarnated would themselves make errors in her situation. And the challenge for Democrats is to lead people to think, What if she were in charge?, without being bullies about it.
Fallows was dead-on not only about the impossible task facing Palin but with his advice to the Obama campaign, which forecast their handling of Palin to a T.