GOP vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin returned home to Wasilla, Alaska, on Thursday, leaving behind eyebrow-raising tales about a towel-clad appearance and internal campaign feuds.
Palin had barely touched down when conservative websites began hawking defiant bumper stickers: “I’ll keep my guns, freedom and money. You can keep ‘The Change’: Palin 2012.”
It’s 1,461 days until the next election, and Palin loyalists have already kicked off the website and mailing list.
Emerging from her plane, Palin was met with chants of “2012! 2012!” She left herself a very big open door when asked about her plans in four years.
“We’ll see what happens then,” she told reporters.
But even as she hedged, stories emerged this week that threatened to collapse Palin’s carefully cultivated image. Among the stories reported by Fox News and Newsweek magazine:
• She showed up in front of John McCain campaign aides “wearing nothing but a towel.”
• She sent staff on a shopping spree for her family that insiders described as the “Wasilla hillbillies looting Nieman Marcus from coast to coast.”
• She was so ignorant of basic civics that aides prepping her for her single debate realized she didn’t know that Africa is a continent and not a country, nor could she identify the countries that make up North America.
“Sickening” accusations
Palin released a statement calling the accusations “so unfortunate and quite honestly, sickening. . . . The accusations we are reading are not true.”
Conservative icon and author Richard Viguerie, who heads and has called Palin “the new Ronald Reagan,” dismissed the reports Thursday and defended Palin as a figure who will continue to have enormous clout with conservatives.
“Almost the entire leadership of the McCain campaign was Washington insiders, lobbyists . . . and they come from a very different background than Sarah Palin,” he said. “She became a hero . . . and a rising star in this campaign.”
Days after the election, Palin’s future is the subject of enormous speculation among Republicans. Conservatives are pushing her to be among the party’s next generation of leaders even as the old guard appears to be distancing itself.
Fox, Newsweek reports
The enmity toward Palin within some factions of the GOP remains abundantly clear. Even before the election was called Tuesday night, damaging leaks began to spring from the embattled McCain campaign, some of whose top advisers were quoted in major newspapers suggesting Palin was a “whack job” and a “diva.” Those advisers said she repeatedly went “rogue,” refusing to tell the campaign when she was talking up issues — such as former Weather Underground member William Ayers’ ties to Barack Obama — or chatting on the telephone with a Canadian radio-show prankster who claimed to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
On election night, The New York Times reported, Palin showed up at McCain’s election-night gathering in Phoenix ready to read a concession speech. It goes against campaign protocol for a vice presidential candidate to speak on election night, and the move was vetoed by McCain strategist Steve Schmidt.
Even Karl Cameron of conservative Fox News reported this week that Palin showed “real problems with basic civics” during her debate prep.
Revelations by Newsweek also were shocking: At the GOP convention, Palin was so “completely unfazed by the boys’ club fraternity she had just joined” that she greeted McCain advisers Schmidt and Mark Salter in her hotel room “wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair.”
And the lingering matter of her wardrobe spending continues. A Republican Party attorney has been assigned to look into Palin’s designer clothing purchases and, reportedly, to retrieve the expensive items.
Newsweek said Palin “used low-level staffers to buy some of the clothes on their credit cards,” something the McCain campaign didn’t find out until aides asked for reimbursement.
Still, conservative leaders downplayed those reports, insisting that base voters were deeply impressed by Palin and her contributions to the ticket.
“The candidacy of Sarah Palin was immensely helpful, absolutely essential to making this a reasonably close race,” said Morton Blackwell, Republican National Committee member from Virginia.
