Romney adviser: Sarah Palin ‘poisoned the well’ (Updated)

That idea that 80% of Romney staffers went on to work in McCain's campaign sounds like a number drawn out of a hat. Most of Romney's top staffers didn't go on to work for McCain. They were either part of Romney's ongoing operation, or they had other jobs.

McCain's top people would have been long-time McCain loyalists. People who were in McCain's camp through all the primaries and before. And those were the people who would have had the closest contact with Palin.

If a former Romney staffer who set up rallies in Sioux Falls or raised money in Sacramento wanted to trash Palin, it's hard to see how their trash talk would get very far or how anybody would believe it or how such a campaign would be coordinated or why anyone would bother. It was people at the top of the McCain campaign who had the most contact with Sarah Palin and were most likely to be believed by the media. They also had a lot to gain or lose by spreading rumors.

Superficially, I guess, Romney people had a big motive: they were looking forward to running Mitt again in 2012. But the McCain people weren't going to just retire. When their candidate lost, they'd have to have excuses or they'd find it hard to get work the next time around, so there was plenty of reason for them to trash Palin.

Also, it turns out that some of the rumors were spread by disruptionists who had no connection with Romney or McCain or Palin or anyone else in the Republican Party. IIRC, Democrat bloggers created and spread the story that Palin didn't know that Africa was a continent, rather than a country -- they were also looking forward to 2012, I guess. But you know, somebody somewhere assumed that those Romney people in McCain's campaign were really behind that rumor.

I can't say that nobody who had ever worked for Romney might have said a nasty word about Palin, but so far as I can tell most of the rumors about Palin came from core McCain people or outside disruptionists. Blaming it all on Romneyites was another smear, at least in my opinion.

It didn't have to be intentionally false. If you ask around an office of professional McCain supporters about leaks in the campaign, it's natural that somebody would point at the campaign that had been McCain's chief opponent in the primaries. You know how this goes. Somebody wonders if it could be Romney's doing. Somebody else makes that guess. A third person says he hears rumors. A fourth says, there are too many people pointing the finger at Mitt's people: it has to be Romney's doing. And sooner or later, somebody's taking all the rumors as sources and reporting it as fact.

Let me repeat. I can't say that nobody in Romney's camp ever attacked Palin -- or spread rumors about other opponents. I'm just saying that this story doesn't pass the smell test to the extent that people think it does. There's something a little fishy in it.

You can agree or disagree, but there's a tendency to take unproven charges of specific activity and make them vague and general and full of "them versus us" sentiment in order to save them from skeptical criticism. Surely it does matter if Palmetto Scoop isn't entirely trustworthy about this matter and if his charges aren't entirely credible.

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