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Depictions ‘took place entirely in her imagination,’ says Wallace. NBC NEWS and NEWS SERVICES NEW YORK - Former McCain campaign senior adviser Nicolle Wallace says Sarah Palin's book "Going Rogue" is "based on fabrications," and that the basis for Palin’s depictions of her and former McCain campaign director Steve Schmidt as villains "took place entirely in her imagination." In a statement to The Rachel Maddow Show, the former McCain spokesperson repeatedly used the word "fiction" to describe Palin's narrative and echoed criticisms by other former McCain staffers. "She [Palin] probably has a legitimate complaint that things could have been better...

Sarah Palin says she was blindsided by Katie Couric's devastating interviews last year because John McCain's aides lulled her into thinking the CBS anchorwoman was a fan. In Palin's new book, "Going Rogue," the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee reveals that her handlers talked up Couric as a working mom - just like her - who was struggling with low self-esteem and even lower ratings. Couric liked and admired her, advised campaign media honcho Nicolle Wallace. The interviews would be a nice favor. The scouting reports were so sympathetic, Palin writes, that that she almost began to "feel sorry" for...

HER TURN! Fri Nov 13 2009 07:27:12 ET Going Rogue: An American Life by Sarah Palin Chapter Four; Section 8, pages 255-257 By the third week in September, a “Free Sarah” campaign was under way and the press at large was growing increasingly critical of the McCain camp’s decision to keep me, my family and friends back home, and my governor’s staff all bottled up. Meanwhile, the question of which news outlet would land the first interview was a big deal, as it always is with a major party candidate. From the beginning, Nicolle [Wallace] pushed for Katie Couric and...

Levi Johnston, not content with just a GQ spread, heads to Condé Nast sibling Vanity Fair to offer a first person account: "Me and Mrs. Palin." The magazine posted a couple excerpts early this morning, including Johnston's account of how Palin considered keeping Bristol's pregnancy a secret. Sarah told me she had a great idea: we would keep it a secret — nobody would know that Bristol was pregnant. She told me that once Bristol had the baby she and Todd would adopt him. That way, she said, Bristol and I didn’t have to worry about anything. Sarah kept mentioning...

In the mail this morning was an advanced copy of Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson's extremely well-reported history of the 2008 presidential campaign: The Battle for America is what the two veteran Posties have called it. The book will be published on August 4; Balz and Johnson will talk about it on Meet the Press on August 2. There are plenty of scoops, and I can't resisting sharing just one involving a critical phase of the campaign in early October of 2008. Whose idea was it for Gov. Sarah Palin to attack Barack Obama as a guy who "pals around...

Internal campaign e-mails exchanged three weeks before Election Day offer a rare look at just how frustrated then Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin had become with the manner in which top McCain campaign aides were handling her candidacy. The e-mails, obtained exclusively, also highlight the power struggle and thinly veiled acrimony that pervaded the relationship between Palin and the campaign's chief strategist, Steve Schmidt. The episode in question began when an investigative report published on the left-leaning Web site Salon.com raised questions about Palin's relationship with members of the Alaska Independence Party (AIP) when she was mayor of Wasilla....

The publication of a Vanity Fair profile of Sarah Palin appears to have opened old wounds in the McCain campaign. At issue is a question that was never resolved following McCain’s loss in November: Who in the McCain campaign was secretly trashing Sarah Palin to the press?

Alaska's lipstick-wearing pit-bull is a "Little Shop of Horrors." That's how one longtime friend and campaign trail companion of John McCain, the vanquished 2008 GOP presidential nominee, described veep nominee Sarah Palin. In an expansive story in the August edition of Vanity Fair, a slew of senior members of McCain's campaign team told reporter Todd S. Purdum that they suffer a kind of survivor's guilt following the 2008 presidential election.

Next time you’re debating Bob Shrum and want to lure him into making ugly and over-the-top attacks, just remind the audience of his unblemished 0-8 record of having lost every presidential race on which he’s worked . . . This morning’s Today offered a prime example of the phenomenon. Nicolle Wallace, former Communications Director to Pres. George W. Bush, made passing reference to Shrum’s failed work on behalf of John Kerry in 2004. A clearly stung Shrum responded by referring to her as “pathetic” and accusing her of possible “foolhardiness.” For good measure, Shrum called Wallace’s claim that Dems are...

University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication presenting CBS “Evening News” anchor Katie Couric with the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Journalism In a word, preposterous. The question I have is if she is getting this award for journalistic excellence, or for fulfilling her role in the liberal political agenda machine? The interview did, in fact, have a huge impact on the election. She achieved the result the Democrat’s desired. Imagine, if you will, if one of her softballs to Obama had garnered similar devastating results and had brought down his candidacy. Would there have been any...

Remember when Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin accused journalist Katie Couric of "exploiting" their disastrous exchange — the one in which Palin couldn’t name some of running mate John McCain’s policies? Couric’s work obviously paid off, because the 52-year-old today received the prestigious Walter Cronkite Award for the exchange. The Baltimore Sun elaborates: "Couric, who weathered one of network TV’s most criticized anchor-desk launches when she took over from interim anchor Bob Schieffer, was named winner of the University of Southern California’s Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in TV Political Journalism for her focused and illuminating interviews with Republican vice-presidential candidate...

Even some former Bush aides are smitten with the new president. Now, will lefties let the GOP inside the tent? No American could watch the inauguration of President Barack Obama this week and not feel pride in the splendor and strength of our democracy. No one watching could miss the drama of this moment of challenge and self-examination for our nation—of seeing a man so well-suited to meet the expectations of the office he fills. The presidency is now within reach for any man who dares to dream big enough. It is no longer an office attainable by members of...

Article in an non-partisan fem website seems pretty believable, despite it being another anonymous source. "Today, a source close to John McCain’s presidential campaign revealed exclusively to wowOwow that it was two stylists who often do work for CBS journalist Katie Couric who were hired by former CBS News political analyst and McCain senior strategist, Nicolle Wallace, around the time of the Republican National Convention. Wallace had worked for CBS Evening News until May 2008 when she left to work on the McCain campaign. Said the source, "They weren’t given any budget or parameters. They just told the stylists to...

I worked for Jeb Bush. Sarah Palin reminds me a lot of Jeb Bush, who was very hands on. He was always in direct contact, email-wise, with reporters. He'd often get back to them before I'd get back to them. She's like that. She's very hands on. Reminds me of my time working for Jeb Bush. She doesn't like a lot of bureaucracy. She gets on her email and deals directly with press and the staff and it's very, very impressive. Very appealing. She works harder than anyone I’ve known in politics. She’ll go until one or two in the...

Wow -that is some savage cutting & gutting that Nicole Wallace has just performed upon Sarah Palin. Nicole & I crossed swords once, during the Harriet Miers nomination battle. Watching what Nicole can do when she is seriously annoyed, I am grateful that I got away from that fight with nothing worse than a few bumps and bruises .... That said: Some of these stories do not ring quite true to me, especially the story about Palin allegedly not realizing that Africa was a continent rather than a country. Apparently she did not grasp that "South Africa" was not the...

NewsBusters.org - Media Research CenterOn Wednesday’s CBS "Early Show," co-host Harry Smith discussed the ‘Potomac Primaries’ with Democratic Strategist Dee Dee Myers and Republican CBS Political Analyst Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush Administration Communications Director, who said of John McCain’s conservative critics: "The more that we see kind of the crazies like Ann Coulter out attacking John McCain, the better Republicans feel about their chances in the general election." This attack upon conservatives critical of McCain, who include Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, and others, was prompted by Harry Smith asking about Mike Huckabee’s continued support in...

<p>One of the aides tells CNN that campaign manager Rick Davis fired Scheunemann after determining that he had been in direct contact with journalists spreading "disinformation" about campaign aides, including Nicolle Wallace and other officials.</p> <p>"He was positioning himself with Palin at the expense of John McCain's campaign message," said one of the aides.</p>

Let the games begin, release the hounds, throw Sarah under the bus....The unholy Washgington insider trinity, comprised of the MSM, the Dems, and the RINO's, is not going to forgive or forget that Sarah nearly stole their thunder and represents the single greatest threat to the status quo. I expect the attack will come in two forms. One will to Quayle her, that is to make her into some kind of bimbo unworthy of actually being taken seriously. The other way will to paint her as the unloyal and kiniving saboteur that was responsible for McCain's failure. Both will be...

"The Commission’s report makes the case for the policies that President Bush has been pursuing in the War on Terror and eliminates any doubt that the best defense against the threat of global terror is a strong offense. While President Bush welcomed the report and praised its conclusion that we are safer today but still have more work to do, our opponent attacked the administration’s progress and leadership in the War on Terror, breaking his own pledge to focus on 'bipartisan solutions.' On a day when Democrats and Republicans stood together for additional reforms and continued progress in making America...

John McCain campaign senior strategist Nicole Wallace conceded Wednesday that the campaign “lost the spin war” by allowing Barack Obama’s campaign to brand the Arizona senator as a dirty campaigner. “The truth is they play dirty politics, and maybe we haven't been quick enough. Maybe we don't have enough friends in the media to carry the message,” Wallace said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show. “We certainly lost the spin war about his fighting a more negative campaign. The truth is that Barack Obama has spent more money on negative attack ads against John McCain than any politician, Democrat or Republican,...

The New York Times and John McCain really don't seem to like each other all that well and it appears the disagreement may have spilled over into a campaign plane ban for Times columnist Maureen Dowd. McCain Campaign chief Steve Schmidt scalded the New York Times just last week in a conference call where he ripped the paper and screamed bias. "Whatever the New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization. It is a pro-Obama advocacy organization," Schmidt said. "This is an organization that is completely, totally, 150 percent in the tank for...

by Mark Finkelstein September 27, 2006 - 08:05 "Good morning, this is Harry Smith reporting from London today, June 10th, 1940. With Luftwaffe pilots now brazenly carrying out daylight bombing raids on London, it's clear that Britain's war against Nazism is a failure." Judging by his take on Iraq, that's presumably how Harry would have reported matters had he been around during the dark days of WWII. Fortunately, Churchill was there: "Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and...