Posts Tagged ‘Saturday Night Live’
Who’s nailin’ Palin? The media, of course. November 7th, 2008
Chicago
No sooner was the McCain campaign pronounced dead around 11 pm on November 4, the autopsy began. The initial area of interest: the dissection of an appendage called Sarah Palin.
After two months on a roller coaster ride, in which the highs were over in the first few days (that is before she opened her mouth) Sarah Palin is back in Alaska endangering moose as predicted. She leaves behind a trail of clothing bills; a gaggle of McCain aides finally able to vent their frustration; and an audience that will miss Tina Fey’s version of Palin on Saturday Night Live. Fey, whose impersonation would have pulled at least as many votes (if not more, it came across as smarter) announced that the character was buried two days ago.
But first, to the aides. That the old man had made a terrible mistake was apparent enough to anyone who followed Palin’s babbling through the campaign, but it took a classy prank to finally convince the McCain camp.
A Canadian comedian pretending to be Nikolas Sarkozy spoke to her on the telephone, softening her up with general platitudes about women in politics, praising her looks and then going on to say that he was looking forward to the new Hustler ‘documentary’ on her (’Who’s nailin’ Palin).
This was about the time that people get it, but not Palin, who giggled. Furthermore, it turned out that although it was ’set up’ days before, she had not cleared the ‘interaction’ with the campaign high command, thus finally establishing her foreign policy credentials for all those who harboured doubts.
It emerged during the subsequent investigation by furious McCain advisers, that Palin had a ‘foreign policy adviser’ herself. Someone, it is believed who lives even closer to Russia than even she does. This man took the fall.
In the recent past, in addition to insightful interviews for the public at large, she had given subtle hints to campaign managers on the inside that she was not Madame Curie. It has been reported that it was difficult to convince her that Africa was not a country, but a continent, for instance.
Then came the bills. $1,50,000 spent on clothing for herself and her family at such hockey mom-frequented stores as Saks and Neiman Marcus. Those around her blithely bought stuff on their personal credit cards and were duly reimbursed by public money.
But more than the clothes, it was the entourage. Palins little and big were all over the campaign, jostling for space in strategy huddles with hapless policy advisers. “The dynamic of meetings change” as a result, one insider told The New Yorker. One report even has her opening the door to her suite clad in two towels, to tell an aide to wait with her husband in another room.
Why did McCain choose Palin? This is a difficult one to answer without kicking an honorable man that’s down. But how he chose her was revealed by the New Yorker’s last issue.
Palin’s attempted crossing from Wasilla to Washington began when a little-known fundamentalist blogger began a campaign promoting her after eliminating other women republicans using wikipedia searches. Then, in the Summer of 2007, two batches of influential conservative media personalities visited Alaska on cruises. Pain hosted both groups and floored them with halibut, salmon and plain charm. Bill Kristol, pundit on Fox News Sunday and influential writer for The Weekly Standard, was the most enamoured. He called her his “heartthrob” and as good as made the announcement of her candidacy before McCain got around to it in early September.
Palin had successfully used the very Washington insiders that she purportedly loathed to get on the ticket.
The New Yorker also revealed that McCain had spent a total of less than three hours with Palin before announcing her as his running mate. But the backroom boys didn’t fare much better. They most likely did not know at the time of the announcement that her teen-age daughter was pregnant (sort of important, isn’t it for a christian values. There were serious gaps in the obviously hurried vetting process before she was flown down to McCain’s retreat in Sedona, Arizona.
Now the question is, if the old man could divine Palin’s neighbour Putin’s thoughts by looking into his eyes in a matter of minutes, what was he thinking looking into Sarah’s for hours?
Tags: Avirook Sen, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Sarkozy Prank, Saturday Night Live, US Elections 2008
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