Quotes of the Day

Sarah Palin, the newest star in the Fox News constellation, bears a striking resemblance to Sarah Palin the vice-presidential candidate.

As she perched on the set of The O'Reilly Factor, luminous, eager and game, her fans saw the woman they fell in love with in the summer of 2008 — still larger than life on the small screen. Brimming with cracker-barrel charm and acerbic scorn, she ridiculed Barack Obama, championed conservative positions and solutions and attacked as clueless the media, with which she has clashed so often. Her foes, including many of the aides who worked for Senator John McCain on his 2008 presidential campaign, also saw a familiar figure — one who, in their estimation, stumbled over syntax, fumbled with the truth and appeared ill informed, incoherent, vindictive and silly during her two months on the national ticket.

The former governor of Alaska is still peddling her mega-selling memoir, Going Rogue, and racking up lucrative speaking engagements. Now she's adding a revenue stream as a paid analyst on the conservative national soapbox. Even before she made her Jan. 12 debut with Bill O'Reilly, the latest round of America's favorite parlor game, What Does Sarah Want?, was in full swing. Is Palin's television gig a sign that she is abandoning her political career and all 2012 aspirations? Or is Fox News meant to serve as the ideal launching pad for an eventual presidential bid fueled by massive grass-roots support?

McCain's former aides watched Palin's Fox debut with the same trepidation with which they anticipated the publication of her memoir in November. Around the time of the book's release, McCain convened an unusual conference call with the top staffers of his campaign. McCainworld had been braced for Palin's tome for months, fearing she would use it to settle scores against a group of aides she had turned against — and vice versa. In the call, however, McCain implored his people to refrain from commenting on the book. He had no appetite for an ugly public airing of his campaign's most heavily soiled laundry.

Palin's memoir outraged many people involved in the McCain-Palin operation. She portrayed McCain's aides as controlling, frazzled and easily spooked. They, in turn, saw in her book an array of the qualities they had come to discern in her during the campaign: the self-serving habits, the malice, the distant relationship with the truth. For McCainworld, all the old feelings toward Palin came back in a rush. But except for chief strategist Steve Schmidt's concise dismissal of the book ("fiction") and communications adviser Nicolle Wallace's somewhat more lengthy refutation on The Rachel Maddow Show, virtually everyone in the McCain-Palin orbit abided by the Senator's wishes — to keep the secrets of the campaign secret.

With the publication of our book, Game Change, and the appearance of Schmidt on 60 Minutes in a piece discussing our reporting, a sharper portrait of Palin has begun to surface, one that is often startling and sometimes shocking. We learned that Palin was scarcely vetted by McCain's lawyers before being placed on the Republican ticket. We learned more about her substantive deficiencies, which were even more dramatic than those that had previously been reported: her lack of understanding about why there are two Koreas, her ignorance about the function of the Federal Reserve, her belief that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. At the lowest moments during preparation for her debate against Joe Biden, some senior McCain aides worried that she was mentally unstable and wasn't up to the job of Vice President.

Adding to the picture are the revelations voiced by Schmidt on 60 Minutes — in particular, her habitual shading of the truth in ways that exposed the campaign to extreme political vulnerability. "You know, it [was] the equivalent of saying down is up and up is down," Schmidt told Anderson Cooper on the program. "[She routinely said things] that were provably, demonstrably untrue."

That other McCain aides have kept quiet for so long about Palin owes to two factors. The first is loyalty to McCain. With his hatred of infighting, desire to put the campaign behind him and perhaps awareness of his complicity in foisting Palin on the world, the erstwhile Republican nominee has encouraged his people to stifle their criticisms and play down their disagreements with her, even though the direction Palin's vision for the future direction of the GOP is diametrically opposed to McCain's.

But the second reason is equally significant and a harbinger of the fights to come in the Republican Party: a deep fear of the Palin forces. Intimidated by the rabidness of her supporters, believing that they can't be swayed by facts and worried about getting crosswise with the most highly energized part of the Republican base, McCainworld has allowed her version of reality to go largely unchallenged — and her rise to continue unchecked. There is perhaps a related factor: a recent Washington Post poll found that Republicans regard Palin as the front runner for their party's 2012 nomination and that she best represents the GOP's values — besting McCain on that score 18% to 13%.

Palin's problem six months after leaving the governor's job in Juneau is that she remains no better informed about national and international affairs than she was as a candidate. With Palin settling in for regular airtime before a vast audience — as opposed to invitation-only speaking events around the country — her weaknesses may once more be on display. The job requirements of punditry — commenting on a variety of political and nonpolitical happenings — are not necessarily the best preparation for a run at the Republican nomination, even in this environment. (Just ask Pat Buchanan.) When asked by O'Reilly why she is still the target of so much criticism, Palin replied, "It's not about me personally. They don't like the message. They don't like the commonsense conservative solutions I articulate." Maybe. But eventually, even other Republicans may be emboldened to challenge her.

When O'Reilly asked Palin for comment about Game Change, she deemed our reporting "gossipy anonymous accusations," declared Schmidt's characterizations of her false and dismissed the book as irrelevant. "The rest of America doesn't care about that kind of crap," she said.

McCain, meanwhile, is still trying to enforce a no-look-back zone on the facts in our book and on his presidential bid. Palin, after all, was a bet that didn't pay off — and probably backfired — for the Arizona Republican. Understandably, McCain isn't keen to admit he played a poor hand. During a Jan. 12 appearance on the Today show, he was asked by Matt Lauer if it was true that his campaign had done only a cursory background check on Palin before selecting her as his running mate. McCain disavowed responsibility for the process used to scrutinize her with a terse "I wouldn't know." When pressed, he added, "I wouldn't know what the sources are or care." Brushing aside questions about the events surrounding the 2008 election, he insisted that he is proud of everyone who worked on his campaign and is focused on the pressing issues of the present.

The question remains: Will Palin run in 2012? She will not say, at least for now. But perhaps the better question is, Can anyone in the Republican Party stop her?

• Mark Halperin and John Heilemann