McCain On Palin's Book

Sarah Palin's upcoming memoir, "Going Rogue: An American Story," is slated for release Nov. 17, and it should offer tons of biographical tidbits for Palin's followers to devour. So what says John McCain, the man who catapulted Palin into the upper echelon of political stardom, about its release?


When asked by NBC's David Gregory at the First Draft of History (being hosted by The Atlantic today at the Newseum in Washington, DC), what he's most looking forward to reading in the memoir, he said...

The part I'm looking to most is the part where it energized our campaign and put us ahead in the polls. The part I'm looking to least were some of the disagreements that took place within the campaign.... Her selection energized our party and that was the key element in putting us ahead in the polls. We were three points ahead on the morning of September 15. The stock market went down 700 points and we went down minus seven.

The McCain campaign was fraught with internal squabbles between staffers at headquarters in the DC suburbs of Virginia and Palin, who reportedly saw staff requests as attempts to control her. Some negative stuff has come out about Palin since the campaign (see Fox's report that, as the McCain staff prepped her, she didn't know South Africa was a country), assumed to be leaked by former McCain staffers.

McCain has handled the fallout of such discord gracefully, flashing a sort of wistful, bemused look when asked about it. But it's no secret that there's bad blood between Palin and some staffers from the McCain campaign...and a memoir offers a wide-open opportunity for the former governor to take some shots.