Who Picked Palin? Part 2

I said yesterday that the important question was not why Sarah palin was picked, but who in McSame's camp picked her. McClatchy News has picked up an Anchorage Daily News article that explains just who picked Sarah Palin. Hint: it still wasn't John McSame.

Last Sunday, Governor Palin and John McCain had a conversation over the phone. Governor Palin was at the Alaska State Fair, and John McCain was at his home at Phoenix. Previously, Rick Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager, had also been in regular contact with the Governor as part of the on-going selection process.

This past week, Governor Palin arrived with Kris Perry in Flagstaff, Arizona, on Wednesday evening. Upon arrival, Governor Palin and her longtime aide Kris Perry met with Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter of the McCain campaign at Mr. Bob Delgado’s home in Flagstaff. Mr. Delgado is the CEO of the Hensley corporation, which is Mrs. Cindy McCain's family business.

On Thursday morning, Governor Palin and staff were joined by Mrs. Cindy McCain and later joined by John McCain at the McCain family home in Sedona, Arizona. At approximately 11:00 a.m. Thursday August 28, 2008, John McCain formally invited Governor Sarah Palin to join the Republican ticket as the vice presidential nominee on the deck of the McCain family home.

The people behind the selection, and vetting of Palin, were McSame's campaign manager and deputy manager and the CEO of Cindy McSame's business. John McSame? Nowhere near that meeting. The green light was given by Schmidt and Salter, not McSame. That seems like McSame was too busy to meet with her until Thursday morning. In other words, John McSame gave Sarah Palin a phone interview for the job of Vice President of the United States, and then passed it off to his campaign guys. Only after the meeting with them did McSame meet with Palin, for the first time since February.

In other words, this is all staged. Schmidt got his orders, he gave them to McSame and green lighted her for him.

McSame's not in charge of his own campaign.

Not only that, but the people that vetted her beforehand didn't actually vet her, as Josh Marshall points out at TPM:

Earlier I noted Andrea Mitchell's reference to reports that the McCain camp had just sent a team of GOP lawyers up to Alaska to do what I guess you'd call a post-vetting of Sarah Palin. Now George Stephanopoulos appears to have more. George says the McCainers are sending a "rapid response team of about ten operatives that includes lawyers" to do the aforementioned deeper vet. A lot of attention is being given to Gov. Palin's daughter's situation. The much bigger deal is the expanding trooper-gate investigation, the fact that Palin lied in her Friday speech about her purported opposition to the Bridge to Nowhere, her apparent former membership in the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, and more. Individually, you can come to your own judgment about how consequential these stories are. What they show pretty clearly now -- in addition to the news that the McCain campaign is only now sending in a vetting team -- is that John McCain didn't do any serious vetting of Palin before he invited her to join his ticket and, he hopes, become Vice President of the United States.

Fundamentally, of course, this is about John McCain. And the real issue here is what this slapdash decision says about his judgment.

In other words, Sarah Palin was a long-shot gamble and McSame is a long-shot gambler who decided that it didn't matter who his VP was, the rest of the field couldn't get him in the White House. His people went for it and hoped it worked out later. We don't know what's hiding in her past, and what we do know about her past doesn't fill me with confidence about McSame's decision making process or Sarah Palin's, for that matter.

She's turning into a disaster.