Battle Royale

This is the kind of stuff that happens shortly after an election, not 10 days prior:

Even as John McCain and Sarah Palin scramble to close the gap in the final days of the 2008 election, stirrings of a Palin insurgency are complicating the campaign's already-tense internal dynamics.

Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline.

"She's lost confidence in most of the people on the plane," said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to "go rogue" in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.

"I think she'd like to go more rogue," he said.

This is one of those delicious stories that we've seen about Democrats for the past several years, but I have a quibble. This is NOT an insurgency. This is jockeying for position inside the party from a position of strength. John McCain is not the future of the GOP - I wouldn't be at all surprised if he went ahead and retired next year. Sarah Palin has the biggest stage in the world for the next ten days and she's going to use it to try to set herself up for a run in 2012.

Check this out today from Iowa (Palin has been in Iowa and New Hampshire in recent days):

SARAH PALIN: John and I will adopt the all-of-the-above approach to meet America's great energy challenges. Yes. [crowd cheers] [...] That means harnessing alternative energy sources, like the wind and the solar and the biomass and the geothermal -- and the ethanol!

A politician pandering to push ethanol in Iowa is unremarkable. But John McCain has made opposition to ethanol subsidies one of the bedrocks of his campaign, an example of how he puts his "country first." You know, we actually don't need to have these massive subsidies to the corn industry, but that's besides the point. Palin is no longer promoting the ticket, she's promoting herself.

It's kind of fascinating to watch, I must admit. Palin has gone completely off message and McCain's staffers are rebelling. They're going public with the recriminations, maybe out of some belief that she would destroy the party as its titular head. I don't know if it's true or not. She has captured the hearts of the hardcore base, and most of the rest of the party is running for cover. Given who's left, I see no reason why she wouldn't be able to consolidate the remnants. She's obviously got the fundie side locked up, and she's charging hard for the economic royalists:

Sarah Palin had a few memorable moments during her campaign stop in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday. But the most eye-opening of them all came, it would appear, when the Alaska Governor somehow drew a connection between Barack Obama's tax policy and an encroaching, nightmarish, communist government. The Illinois Democrat, she hysterically suggested, would, through his proposals, create a country "where the people are not free."

"See, under a big government, more tax agenda, what you thought was yours would really start belonging to somebody else, to everybody else. If you thought your income, your property, your inventory, your investments were, were yours, they would really collectively belong to everybody. Obama, Barack Obama has an ideological commitment to higher taxes, and I say this based on his record... Higher taxes, more government, misusing the power to tax leads to government moving into the role of some believing that government then has to take care of us. And government kind of moving into the role as the other half of our family, making decisions for us. Now, they do this in other countries where the people are not free. Let us fight for what is right. John McCain and I, we will put our trust in you."

I don't see a lot to complain about from the Big Money Boyz. And if there's one thing those types like, it's an empty suit (or an empty $150,000 wardrobe) to fill with their conservative mantras. Not to mention how they love a figure who is misunderestimated.

The war to blame either McCain or Palin in the aftermath is going to be so intense that it's already started. And the damning with faint praise we're seeing from McCain allies (Lieberman, Ridge) is part of that brawl. But I'm not certain that can stop her. She's going for it.

...McCain's people calling her a diva is really kind of amusing. It's the SAME attack they made on Barack Obama through the summer. They couldn't manage to mix it up a bit?