Sarah Palin’s Displacement Problem

From Newsweek (Chapter 6 of "Secrets of the 2008 Campaign"):

There was grumbling that Palin had jumped the gun by bringing up [William] Ayers at her rallies before the campaign could properly do the groundwork with a rollout strategy and ads. (At one rally, she had talked about Obama "palling around with terrorists.") Palin was mad at her handlers. Reportedly, she felt that [Nicole] Wallace and [Steve] Schmidt had poorly coached and advised her. One adviser later speculated that she impulsively talked about Ayers because she felt thwarted—she had really wanted to bring up the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. (Actually, Palin was feeling hurt and angry over the tabloid treatment of her 17-year-old daughter Bristol, and decided—on her own—that Ayers should be fair game. McCain's advisers were working on a strategy that would launch an Ayers attack the following week, but McCain had not signed off on it, and [Mark] Salter was resisting.)

A lot of folks have been chattering about how Palin "jumped the gun" on the Ayers rollout with the implication being that she went "rogue" because she felt McCain's advisers weren't being politically aggressive enough, but the video interview with Newsweek's Katie Connolly at their site sheds light on the real reason Palin brought up Ayers earlier than planned:

"She was feeling very betrayed by what happened with her daughter and having seeing her daughter Bristol splashed across all of the tabloids because of her pregnancy and when her email account got hacked she found that incredibly difficult to deal with and Bristol Palin started getting awful emails and text messages from random strangers about her pregnancy. Palin herself was feeling that if her family can become under this sort of attack why can't we bring up some of Barack Obama's associations?"

Here's the video. The relevant portion starts at about the 45 second mark, including some additional insight from Evan Thomas:



In short, Palin was frustrated about occurrences the Obama campaign had nothing to do with and she lashed out at Barack to make herself feel better. That's a classic example of anger displacement and not the kind of behavior you'd like to see from a vice presidential candidate. America dodged a bigass bullet keeping this spiteful ignoramus one heartbeat away from the presidency. We all know she doesn't have the necessary intellect for the job, but it should be fairly obvious after this revelation that she doesn't possess a modicum of the required temperament either.

[crossposted at Rumproast]