Sarah Palin Fighting Back Against Handlers

I'm not surprised to hear this:

Even as John McCain and Sarah Palin scramble to close the gap in the final days of the 2008 election, stirrings of a Palin insurgency are complicating the campaign's already-tense internal dynamics.

Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline.

"She's 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.

The emergence of a Palin faction comes as Republicans gird for a battle over the future of their party: Some see her as a charismatic, hawkish conservative leader with the potential, still unrealized, to cross over to attract moderate voters. Anger among Republicans who see Palin as a star and as a potential future leader has boiled over because, they say, they see other senior McCain aides preparing to blame her in the event he is defeated.

"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, whose sometimes painful content the campaign allowed to be parceled out over a week.

"A number of Gov. Palin's staff have not had her best interests at heart, and they have not had the campaign's best interests at heart," the McCain insider fumed, noting that Wallace left an executive job at CBS to join the campaign.

Wallace declined to engage publicly in the finger-pointing that has consumed the campaign in the final weeks.

"I am in awe of [Palin's] strength under constant fire by the media," she said in an e-mail. "If someone wants to throw me under the bus, my personal belief is that the most graceful thing to do is to lie there."

There are those in GOP inner circle who. seeing Palin's star power as a threat to their own political ambitions, will no doubt try to place the blame for a McCain loss squarely on her. In reality, the only reason McCain is still a factor in this race at all is because Palin energized the conservative base that had pretty much written McCain off. Without her McCain would be trying to win with a dispirited Republican base - an impossible task.

If McCain loses, a significant part of the blame has to be on the way Palin was handled in those early days following the convention. She should have been out in front of lots of people and let the press complain. She should have been doing press conferences instead of those silly one-on-one "gotcha" interviews. She would have handled those just fine.

However, the ever-cautious Bush people tried to hard to keep her out of difficult situations and in so doing allowed a lot of myths to be created about her without any blowback from the campaign. By the time they finally let Palin out she was already damaged goods in many political circles.

Can she comeback again in the future? Absolutely. She'll be a lot more seasoned as a candidate and will undoubtedly be surrounded by a different crew of aides - people who know her and understand her strengths. She will be a formidable candidate.