Sarah Palin, Nicolle Wallace, CBS, Katie Couric…Too Close for Comfort? (And What of George and Jeb?)

~~By InsightAnalytical

Lady Boomer NYC has a few things to say about the trashing of Sarah Palin and over at Savage Politics, there’s another great post discussing Palin and her brave self-defense against the crap that has been hurled at her.  After reading these posts, I recalled having heard the name “Nicolle Wallace” mentioned the other day on the TEEVEE,  I did some nosing around.  (Her bio at Wikipedia seems to cover a lot of what I found, so I’m linking to that rather than a lot of bits and pieces.)

As you may recall, the trashing of Palin started before the election. Back on October 25th a piece by Ben Smith at Politco.com delivered the negative news, but also quoted the pushback:

The emergence of a Palin faction comes as Republicans gird for a battle over the future of their party: Some see her as a charismatic, hawkish conservative leader with the potential, still unrealized, to cross over to attract moderate voters. Anger among Republicans who see Palin as a star and as a potential future leader has boiled over because, they say, they see other senior McCain aides preparing to blame her in the event he is defeated.

“These people are going to try and shred her after the campaign to divert blame from themselves,” a McCain insider said, referring to McCain’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, and to Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush aide who has taken a lead role in Palin’s campaign. Palin’s partisans blame Wallace, in particular, for Palin’s avoiding of the media for days and then giving a high-stakes interview to CBS News’ Katie Couric, the sometimes painful content of which the campaign allowed to be parceled out over a week.

“A number of Gov. Palin’s staff have not had her best interests at heart, and they have not had the campaign’s best interests at heart,” the McCain insider fumed, noting that Wallace left an executive job at CBS to join the campaign.

Let’s be clear. Wallace wasn’t just any “executive” at CBS…she was making a buck as a political analyst on the CBS News with Katie Couric.  According to the Wikipedia summary: