McCain Advisers Feel Guilty Over Loosing Sarah Palin on the American Public

By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

John McCain's advisers thought Sarah Palin was pretty goofy. That is, after they almost put her in the White House as vice president of the United States, a heartbeat from the Oval Office. "No serious vetting had been done," writes Todd Purdum, in a new article by Vanity Fair. The McCain team was shocked, afterwards, to discover a certain "slipperiness—about what the truth was and whether the truth even mattered" to the Alaska governor.

More than one of the Alaskans he spoke to independently told Purdum that, after dealing with Palin, they turned to the Internet and Googled the clinical definition of a narcissistic personality disorder: "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration and lack of empathy."

Palin is "at once the sexiest and the riskiest brand in the Republican Party," Purdum writes. But rather than go home to Alaska, compile an impressive record, and study foreign policy, she "has done none of this," he says, and instead pursues an "erratic" course that raises questions about her fitness for higher office.

Says Purdum: "When she chooses to reveal herself, what she reveals is not always the same thing as the truth." The various members of McCain's campaign who talked to him, he says, now show symptoms of "survivor's guilt" at what they almost did to their country.

Wonderful. Thanks, Mac. 

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