One of the more amusing bits of stealth marketing that's been mounted in support of pan-2008 campaign gossip swamp Game Change was found on Time Magazine's website yesterday, in which Mark Halperin and John Heilemann practically begged Sarah Palin to please, please, please react to their book! After all, what was the point of putting her name on the cover, like analog search-engine-optimization bait, if she wasn't going to acknowledge their existence? They write:
The former Alaska governor's memoir did, in fact, outrage many people involved in the McCain-Palin operation. They saw in the book an array of the same qualities they had come to discern in her during the two months of the general election: the self-serving habits, the vindictiveness, the distant relationship with the truth. For McCainworld, all the old feelings toward Palin came back in a rush. But except for chief strategist Steve Schmidt's concise dis of the book ("fiction") and communications adviser Nicolle Wallace's somewhat more lengthy refutation on The Rachel Maddow Show, virtually everyone else in the McCain-Palin orbit abided by the Senator's wishes -- keeping the secrets of the campaign secret.
Until this week, that is. With the publication of our book Game Change and the appearance of Schmidt on 60 Minutes in a piece discussing our reporting, much of the truth about Palin has begun to emerge. The questions are how she might respond and what effect the turn of events will have on her future -- a future that now includes a gig at Fox News.
Unlike Halperin and Heilemann's Palin-bashers, of course, Schmidt and Wallace didn't hide behind anonymity. Air America's Ana Marie Cox suggests that Schmidt's comments came at a cost to his career as a political consultant. And Wallace provided her recollections but declined to go on the air herself.
I'm not at all sure what "truth" about Palin "has begun to emerge" now that Game Change has been published. That she didn't know a lot of basic facts about the world and that McCain campaign officials found her to be a terror to work with has pretty much long been established. Seems to me that the only "truth" is that a whole lot of other people chose to air their grievances within the consequence-free environment that Halperin and Heilemann provided. And, like I said yesterday, unnamed sources freed from accountability and given free rein to tell tales out of school tend to just make stuff up, so who really knows what's "true"?
At any rate, Palin granted the authors their wish on Fox News host Bill O'Reilly's show last night, and she basically called Heilemann a liar and repeatedly pointed out that neither of the book's authors had ever asked her a question or been on the scene when the campaign events were unfolding. And then, lest you imagine that Palin had never uttered anything eminently sensible in her life, she said this:
PALIN: See, these reporters were not there. And, I think that these are the political establishment reporters who love to gin up controversy and spin up gossip. The rest of America doesn't care about that kind of crap. The rest of America--we are concerned about a 10 percent unemployment rate.
What can I say? Strictly on the matter of Game Change, I find it hard to take exception to Palin's take. The only thing that lessens the impact here is that, excepting her new colleagues, she pretty much broadly considers everyone in the media to be an establishment hack.
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