Palin derided by top McCain aide, book
By Eric Zimmermann – 01/10/10 07:00 PM ET
…Most troubling to the campaign, Schmidt said, was Palin’s horrendous performance during prep sessions for her debate with then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.).
Schmidt recounts receiving a frantic phone call from an aide who was trying to prepare the Alaska governor.
“He told us that the debate was going to be a debacle of historic and epic proportions. He told us she was not focused. She was not engaged. She was really not participating in the prep,” says Schmidt.
The campaign flew her out to McCain’s Arizona ranch and simplified the debate prep sessions. Things seemed to better, except for one problem: Palin couldn’t say Joe Biden’s name.
Palin repeatedly referred to Biden as “O’Biden,” Schmidt says, leading to fears that she would mangle his name throughout the debate and create a PR disaster for the campaign.
While the Edwards-will-soon-admit-paternity watch goes on, and the tell-all book is on the way, the woman who would’ve destroyed a Presidential campaign goes on subsisting in the shadows. Thought it’d be timely to post some of her bio highlights–she’s no shrinking violet, for sure. It’s not surprising at all that she ended up where she did.
10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Rielle Hunter
1.) Rielle Hunter is not her name, it’s Lisa Jo Druck. ‘Hunter’ came from her first marriage, and ‘Rielle’ she just made up.
2.) Her father was a notorious fraudster. James Druck participated in a scheme to electrocute show horses in order to collect big money insurance claims. The Horse Murders scandal was one of the ‘biggest, most gruesome stories in sports.’ He died while the FBI was still investigating him.
3.) Lisa was a top-notch jumper. Her career ended at 17 when her father killed her beloved show jumper, Henry the Hawk, in order to collect a $150,000 claim. Which he did.
4.) She’s a former girlfriend of ‘Brat Pack’ novelist Jay McInerney.
5.) She’s the inspiration for both McInerney’s and Bret Easton Ellis’ ubiquitous Alison Poole character.
[Story of My Life] is narrated in the first-person from the point of view of Alison Poole, “an ostensibly jaded, cocaine-addled, sexually voracious 20-year old.” Alison is originally from Virginia and lives in Manhattan, where she is involved in several sexual relationships and is aspiring to become an actress. She falls in love with bond trader and Shakespeare expert Dean, but soon they betray each other. The novel implies that the cause of protagonist Alison Poole’s “party girl” behavior is her father’s abuse, including the murder of her prize jumping horse.
6.) After she married wealthy attorney ‘Kip’ Hunter, he financed a play for her to star in, ‘Savage in Limbo.’
7.) They later moved to Beverly Hills so she could pursue an acting career. She has appeared in a few movies, including ‘Ricochet.’ They divorced in 2000.
8.) She started Midline Groove Productions, a New Jersey based media company. They produced 4 online videos for the Edwards campaign and were paid $100,000. Originally titled ‘Inspiring Politics: A Webisode Series Following John Edwards’, the clips were removed from YouTube after the hot controversy but have since been restored:
9.) She appeared before a Raleigh, North Carolina, grand jury in August that is investigating, in part, an additional $14,000 in payments the Edwards campaign made to her after they became aware that she was pregnant, likely with Edwards’ child.
10.) She and Edwards originally randomly came across each other outside of a hotel in New York. She greeted him by saying ‘You are so hot.’
After having an actor-politician, a guy who merely looks the part, will California be interested in a politician who actually hates politics? From what I can tell, this business-woman first voted in a Presidential election last year. Maybe.
At the unofficial kickoff Saturday of the 2010 Republican primary campaign for governor, former eBay CEO and political neophyte Meg Whitman struggled to explain her abysmal voting record.
A year ago, The Chronicle reported that Whitman, 53, had not registered as a Republican in California until 2007 and had a spotty voting history for several years in the state before that. Last week, a Sacramento Bee investigation found no evidence of Whitman’s voting before 2002 in several other states where she lived previously.
On Saturday at the state Republican Convention, Whitman – who has never held nor sought political office – did not dispute the report and offered her past response to questions about her voting: “There is no excuse for my voting record. I didn’t vote as often as I should.”
She repeated variations of that response as reporters continued to ask why she hadn’t voted for so many years – especially in light of passages in her speech to the convention.
“I care deeply about this state,” Whitman told the gathering of GOP activists, adding that among voters there is “a profound hunger for change, for leadership and for authenticity. Californians want to trust their leaders again.”
Finally, she simply refused to take further questions about her failure to vote: “That’s all we’re going to say about it,” she declared…
In no particular order, the little stories of 2008 that said a lot.
Re-load.
Hillary and sniper fire:
Of course, we can forgive her for a faulty memory. But she never did stop sticking her foot in her mouth–the gaffes kept coming without any stop.
Hillary fans were furious that people, especially Democrats, were so hard on her. But they missed an important point: once the Democratic candidate was chosen, the spotlight and the pressure were going to get much, much worse. Hillary would have continued to make mistakes which would have worked against Democratic hopes.
It was no mistake that Obama turned out to be a great candidate. He looked good, remained unflappable, managed a better campaign, and he beat the Republican by seven points. The story: pressure is a good test.
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Jan 11, 2010 
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2008, 60 minutes, campaign, can i call you joe, debacle, debate, disaster, epic proportions, game change, joe biden, mccain, o'biden, politics, preparing, sarah palin, steve schmidt, stupid, vice president
