When a couple McCain campaign staffers went to war on Sarah Palin last fall, trying to make her the implausible scapegoat for their candidate’s loss, one obvious motive was to shift the blame for the loss away from their own (dismal) performance. Beyond that, there were rumors that the Romney camp was behind it in an effort to help Mitt Romney’s chances to win the GOP’s presidential nomination in 2012. It quickly became clear, however, that Nicolle Wallace, a former CBS executive whom the McCain campaign made Gov. Palin’s chief handler (and who, as such, was responsible for most of the decisions that hurt Gov. Palin), was the primary bad actor; at that point, the Romney theory fell by the wayside, because Wallace wasn’t allied with the Romney camp. She had been, however, an aide to George W. Bush and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, which prompted the suggestion that the deep motive behind her attempt to smear Gov. Palin was in fact to clear the decks for Jeb Bush to run for President.Now, we have an idea why. Judging from her column yesterday, Wallace may be a Republican but she’s no conservative; rather, she seems pretty clearly to be an Establishment Republican who is opposed to any sort of conservative resurgence within the GOP. She worked for the Bushes, who are the First Family of the oldline GOP Establishment if anyone is, and then went to work for John McCain, who was (from the Establishment perspective) President Bush’s logical successor despite the differences between the two men; but when Sen. McCain named an actual conservative as his running mate—and an appealing, charismatic, pathbreaking conservative at that—that obviously posed her a problem. Erick Erickson of RedState writes about Wallace,
We don’t know why she behaved as she did other than to save her own skin at the expense of a decent women maligned by the press and handled incompetently by the McCain campaign.
I agree that we can’t know for sure; but I do wonder, given what we do know, if at some level Wallace was sabotaging Gov. Palin. I don’t say that she was doing so consciously—but given that Gov. Palin clearly represented a threat to Wallace’s own political views and the wing of the party with which she has identified herself, she may well have done so subconsciously. At the very least, and particularly given the remarkably poor way in which she assisted the Governor, she clearly was not motivated to do her best work on Gov. Palin’s behalf. When one considers how she acted once she was free to say whatever she wanted about Gov. Palin, however, the possibility that her sabotage may have been at least semi-deliberate (an effort to play down the Governor and thus hurt her without hurting Sen. McCain’s campaign) cannot be ruled out.Whether Gov. Jeb Bush will in fact jump into the 2012 presidential race, I have no idea; but if he does, regardless of attempts to hatchet down Gov. Palin or anyone else, I can’t imagine him winning the nomination. Had things played out differently, I think he might have been a fine president—he was a good governor in Florida, and I certainly would have preferred him to his brother—but not now; the GOP needs to turn away from its establishment candidates and back to conservatism. It also needs to return to its Reaganite roots in another way: it needs to throw overboard the people who think it’s appropriate to hatchet down fellow Republicans for political gain. Like Nicolle Wallace.