Picking a fight with the wrong people.
Palin is going to pay the price for going rogue.
On Wednesday, two top McCain campaign advisers said that the clothing purchases for Ms. Palin and her family were a particular source of outrage for them. As they portrayed it, Ms. Palin had been advised by Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain aide, that she should buy three new suits for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in September and three additional suits for the fall campaign. The budget for the clothes was anticipated to be from $20,000 to $25,000, the officials said.
Instead, in a public relations debacle undermining Ms. Palin’s image as an everywoman “hockey mom,” bills came in to the Republican National Committee for about $150,000, including charges of $75,062 at Neiman Marcus and $49,425 at Saks Fifth Avenue. The bills included clothing for Ms. Palin’s family and purchases of shoes, luggage and jewelry, the advisers said.
The advisers described the McCain campaign as incredulous about the shopping spree and said Republican National Committee lawyers were likely to go to Alaska to conduct an inventory and try to account for all that was spent.
It would amuse me to no end of they end up making Palin reimburse the RNC for all that stuff she bought with their dime. But that may not be the worst of her problems.
The neocons who have been whispering in Palin's ear apparently convinced her that she's the future face of the Republican party, and her conduct over the last weeks of the campaign bore out that she was campaigning more for herself than McCain as the campaign wore down. It may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but after McCain's loss the GOP is looking for a scapegoat. This is where it gets problematic for Palin.
Palin is accustomed to playing on a much smaller playing field - the relatively small-time politics of Alaska - and her MO of stabbing mentors in the back and stepping over their bodies worked pretty well for her there. But she's made a monumental mistake by trying it on the national stage.
A week before the election, I wrote this:
In the wake of her being chosen for the VP slot, McCain's campaign sent a small army of lawyers to Alaska, presumably to keep the lid on the burgeoning Troopergate scandal. They were privy to a lot of documents, a lot of inside information, probably the whole story.
If Palin chooses to go nuclear the day after Election Day, who's to say that McCain wouldn't stage a counter-strike and use all that information against her? They know everything. They saw all the documents that they were keeping out of the media's hands. They interviewed all the witnesses, and because of those interviews they kept those witnesses away from the media.
See where I'm going here? They know where the bodies are buried.
That's the deal you make when you sign on with an organization like McCain's campaign. Under the guise of 'protecting' Palin, they got access to, and probably still have records of, all the slime.
Does anyone think for a moment that a vindictive old bastard like McCain and a hard-boiled political operative like Steve Schmidt wouldn't pull the pin on that grenade if things escalate and Palin says the wrong thing?
This scenario is now playing out in real time. Palin's latest neocon BFF, Randy Scheuneman, was fired from the McCain campaign for trying to hang Clothes-gate around the neck of Nicole Wallace (although he denies it). And this clip from Fox News seems to indicate that the RNC is not the least bit averse to further tearing down Palin's already-thin claim that she'd have any business running this country:
If there's one thing we learned about the real John McCain in this election, it's that he has a long memory and can hold a world-class grudge. McCain and Steve Schmidt will show no compunction whatsoever about bloodying Palin, and we've only seen the beginning of it here. Remember, under the guise of 'protecting' Palin during the campaign, they learned everything about her dealings in Alaska.
Sarah Palin has miscalculated by believing she could take on John McCain, Steve Schmidt and the RNC and use them to further her ambition. That type of gamesmanship might work for her up on the tundra, but she's pitted herself against people who have been playing the game a lot longer, and on a grander scale, than she can even imagine. At the rate this fight is progressing, she'll be lucky to survive her term as governor.
Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. You picked a fight with the wrong people, and they're gonna roll right over you.