…but perfectly qualified to work at a big-time news weekly. As John McCormack points out, just about everything in this Newsweek sentence is wrong:
The day of the third debate, Palin refused to go onstage with New Hampshire GOP Sen. John Sununu and Jeb Bradley, a New Hampshire congressman running for the Senate, because they were pro-choice and because Bradley opposed drilling in Alaska.
:John Sununu has a 100% pro-life record. Jeb Bradley was not running for the Senate; he was Congressman for the NH First District until 2006 and was seeking to get his old seat back. And a dummy who doesn’t even know Africa’s a continent supposedly is fully up to speed on a Congressional candidate’s views on abortion?
By the way, if the issue here is the lack of party solidarity demonstrated by Governor Palin, a couple of points:
1) When I saw her in Laconia, NH, she was on stage with Sununu and Bradley and behaved perfectly well with them.
2) Joe Kenney, the Republican gubernatorial candidate for New Hampshire and a current state senator*, told me the McCain team refused to allow him to appear on stage at the rally. The official explanation was that he hadn’t had a Secret Service background check, and it would not be possible to arrange one in time. Needless to say, this was not persuasive.
From this last few days, the McCain campaign seems determined to go down in history as a blend of personal viciousness and strategic ineptitude. Not an attractive combination.
(*and a USMC Active Reserves officer who’s done two tours in Iraq. Didn’t have problems getting clearance for killing his country’s enemies, but the McCain camp evidently has tougher entry qualifications.)