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On the afternoon of Oct. 2, 2008 — the day of the vice presidential debate last year — Politico’s Jonathan Martin broke the news that Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) presidential campaign was “pulling out of Michigan.” The next day, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin told Fox News’ Carl Cameron that she disagreed with the decision. “I fired a quick e-mail and said, oh, come on. Do we have to call it there?” said Palin. “I want to get back to Michigan and I want to try.”
But in her interview with Oprah Winfrey, which aired yesterday, Palin claimed that she only “went rogue” on the Michigan message because she “didn’t know we pulled out of Michigan”:
WINFREY: Didn’t several times they say to you when actually you mentioned, when you were talking about pulling out of Michigan and you said I wished we’d stayed in Michigan. Weren’t you told then, Sarah just stay on script?
PALIN: Right, told after wards and that, that was always puzzling to me because if I were to respond to a reporter’s questions very candidly, honestly, for instance, they say, “what do you think about the campaign pulling out of Michigan” and I think, “darn I wish we weren’t. Every vote matters, I can’t wait to get back to Michigan” and then told afterwards that, “oh, you screwed up. You went rogue on us Sarah, you’re not supposed to be.” And my reminder to the campaign was, I didn’t know we pulled out of Michigan. My entire VP team, we didn’t know that we had pulled out. I’m sorry, I apologize, but speaking candidly to a reporter.
Watch it:
Clearly, if Palin told Cameron that she had sent an e-mail to the McCain high command disagreeing with the move, she knew that the decision had been made. Additionally, in their reported book on Sarah Palin, former Fox News embed Shushannah Walshe and CBS News digital journalist Scott Conroy reveal that Palin knew she had made a mistake in her interview with Cameron:
The e-mail that Palin sent was, in fact, essentially how she described it to Cameron. She wrote to her traveling staff and top McCain advisers, “If there’s any time, Todd and I would love a quick return to Michigan-we’d tour the plants, etc. . . . If it does McC any good. I know you have a plan, but I hate to see us leave Michigan. We’ll do whatever we had [sic] to do there to give it a 2nd effort.”
A senior aide replied, “Michigan is out of reach unless something drastic happens. We must win oh and hopefully pa.”
Palin replied that she “got it,” but her subsequent interview with Cameron had shown that she hadn’t. She acknowledged as much in a post-interview e-mail to senior staff, writing, “Oops-I mentioned something about that to Carl Cameron and it’s now recorded that I’d love to give Michigan the ol’ college try.” Later in the day, she tried once more. “It’s a cheap 4hr drive from WI. I’ll pay for the gas,” she wrote.
This isn’t the first claim that Palin has made in her book and during her promotional tour that has been contradicted by campaign e-mails. In her book, Palin wrote that “from the beginning” she liked the idea of appearing on Saturday Night Live. But in an e-mail thread from the campaign that was provided to the Huffington Post, Palin said she was “not thrilled” about the idea of going on the show because “these folks are whack.”
In an interview with Walshe and Conroy, The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder noted that their book chronicles “fairly persuasively, a large number of what seem to be fairly egregious distortions” by Palin. “Sarah Palin is quick to cast aside people who cross her in even minor ways, and her unwillingness to tolerate much dissent often leads to an infallibility syndrome,” replied the authors, who later added that she has a “tendency to wildly exaggerate the truth.”
A new ABC/Washington Post poll finds that Americans still do not like Sarah Palin, who is kicking off her Going Rogue book tour with a taped interview airing today on the Oprah Winfrey show.
The poll finds that a majority of Americans, 52% of respondents, have an unfavorable opinion of her, compared to only 43% favorable.
In addition, respondents were asked this question: "Regardless of whether or not you'd vote for her, do you think Palin is or is not qualified to serve as president?" The numbers: qualified 38%, not qualified 60%.
In addition, 53% say they would definitely not vote for her. Only 9% would definitely vote for her, and 37% would consider it (those people are likely Republicans and GOP-leaners who want to see all the options).
A top Republican political fund-raising and outreach firm gives convicted felons access to political donors' credit-card information, according to three former employees.
Minnesota-based FLS Connect uses low-wage workers to make fund-raising calls for a bevy of prominent GOP clients. And many of those workers -- including those responsible for processing credit-card transactions -- have felony convictions, the former employees said.
In response, FLS Connect co-founder Jeff Larson, a Karl Rove protege, told TPMmuckraker that the firm would undergo a review from an outside, independent auditor "to ensure the highest standard of confidence in our processes."
Last month, the founder of a different Republican outreach firm, Bonner & Associates, was hauled before Congress after his company sent forged letters to lawmakers on a key legislative issue. Nothing like that has come to light at FLS, but in interviews with TPMmuckraker, the former employees described a company whose business practices might come as a shock to the well-heeled Republican donors from whom it solicits money. FLS fundraisers, encouraged by supervisors to cut corners in pursuit of donations, routinely mislead potential contributors, say the former employees. And many workers in the company's Phoenix office are ex-cons, who are paid not much more than minimum wage, lack benefits, and work in squalid conditions.
The claim that ex-felons have access to credit-card information was first made by former FLS employee Brian Jones in an interview last week with the website Politics in Minnesota (PIM). Larson denied the charge to PIM.
But in interviews with TPMmuckraker, two other recent employees, Alicia Baca and David Childs, backed Jones up. And Jones himself, a former felon who was recently fired from FLS's Phoenix office, told us he stood by his claim. "He is just a liar," Jones, 37, said of Larson.
Baca, Childs, and Jones explained that when a donor agrees to contribute money by credit card, they're told that they'll be transferred to a supervisor to handle the transaction. But in fact, the three said, they're transferred to another FLS employee in the same room. That person has gone through only a cursory screening process, and in no way acts as a supervisor to the caller making the fundraising pitch. Indeed, they said, he generally earns less money than the fundraising caller...................more
On Saturday, a few dozen anti-immigration activists gathered on the steps of the Minnesota State Capitol for a Tea Party, part of the nationwide effort by Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC). But somehow, one of the counter-protesters, a “concerned citizen from Minneapolis” named “Robert Erickson,” manged to get on the speaking list. His address started with the standard anti-immigrant rhetoric, but then revealed that he was talking about European immigrants. By this time, however, the crowd was in a frenzy and joined him in his chants of “Columbus go home!” and “Europeans out!”:
Let’s send these European immigrants back where they came from! I don’t care if they are Polish, Irish, English, Italian, or Norwegian! European immigrants are responsible for the most violent and heinous crimes in the history of the world, including genocide and slavery! Its time to restore the sovereignty of people native to this land! I want more workplace raids, starting with the big banks downtown.
Christopher Day at DailyKos notes, “The Tea-Baggers seem pretty clueless, and for the most part don’t even seem to realize they have been punk’d.”
In book full of complaints, Palin writes: "I don't like to hear people complain"
In her forthcoming memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin writes, "I don't like to hear people complain," before stating one "complaint for the record" about the national media. However, Palin's professed distaste for "complaints" is undercut by the numerous complaints that fill the pages of Going Rogue -- complaints directed at specific media personalities, national and local media outlets, and the McCain campaign. Read More
Despite finding the time to discuss "bow-gate," Fox News Sunday ignored reports of alleged Blackwater bribes
Despite finding the time to discuss the manner in which President Obama greeted the emperor of Japan on the November 15 broadcast of Fox News Sunday, there was no time during the program devoted to recent reports that officials at Xe Services -- formerly Blackwater Worldwide -- had allegedly authorized about $1 million in bribery payments to Iraqi officials in the aftermath of a fatal shooting involving Blackwater security guards. By contrast, Fox News Sunday has previously devoted 18 minutes of broadcast time to discussing videos of conservative activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles posing as a pimp and a prostitute while asking for assistance from employees at an ACORN office, which followed Fox News' aggressive promotion and coverage of the undercover videos. Read More
Before Rogue: Sarah Palin's Top 10 past falsehoods
In anticipation of the release of Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue, Media Matters for America has compiled a list of Palin's Top 10 falsehoods from before the book was published. Read More
Rogue Facts: Media Matters' ongoing list of falsehoods in Palin's memoir
Media Matters for America has documented numerous falsehoods in Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life. Below is a list of what we've found so far. Read More
