New Book: Sarah Palin Couldn’t Remember Joe Biden’s Name
Past is prologue? Just in time for the 2010 mid-term election bonanza comes the much-anticipated Game Change, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. So anticipated in fact that what is billed as a “sweeping, novelistic portrait of this historic and unusual race” is under embargo until Monday. Ahead of the release the two are being interviewed on 60 Minutes this Sunday along with John McCain’s former top campaign strategist Steve Schmidt. Additionally, Drudge has devoted a entire box to it, including what yesterday looked like an excerpt, but which appears to have since been removed.
This from CBS (video below):
Asked by Barack Obama if she would be his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton – after initially turning him down – was concerned that her husband’s penchant for causing controversy would interfere with her new role. Sarah Palin was so overwhelmed by the amount of information she needed to learn to debate Joe Biden that campaign staffers thought the debate might be a “debacle of historic and epic proportions”…Palin had a reflexive tendency to refer to Biden as “O’Biden,” says Schmidt, something that had to be fixed before the debate. He says others in the campaign came up with a solution. “It was multiple people – and I wasn’t one of them – who all said at the same time, ‘Just say, Can I call you Joe,’ which she did.”
Schmidt says he took over the prepping, simplified it, and says she “more than held her own” in the debate. But not without one “O’Biden” slip on national television.
It will likely be a must-read in media circles as well. Mark Halperin, currently a journalist for Time, and formerly for ABC News (he was the original The Note) was once dubbed by the New Yorker as “leading purveyor of inside dope.” Heilemann is the much-read political columnist for New York. The book, which initially sold to Harper for six figures has already been optioned by HBO.
