Phoning O’Reilly Was Part Of Palin’s ‘Going Rogue’ During Campaign

video

by Steve Krakauer | 10:33 am, November 20th, 2009

» 3 comments

Bill O’Reilly finally got a chance to interview Sarah Palin after saying she was being kept off his show during the 2008 campaign. First order of business was figuring out why that happened.

And what was revealed was Palin personally called O’Reilly at home in October 2008.

Here’s the exchange at the beginning of the interview:

O’Reilly: A phone call you actually made to me to my house, late October 2008, we’d been trying to get you on The Factor for months. Do you remember that?
Palin: I do, shhh, that was part of that ‘going rogue’ stuff no one was supposed to know about in the campaign.
O’Reilly: So you’re going rogue calling O’Reilly, but you basically said to me ‘I want to do the show,’ but why didn’t you?

There’s a lot of “Going Rogue” mentions during Sarah Palin Week, but this sounds legitimately rogue-like. To call a media figure for what sounded like, at the time, an off-the-record admission that she wanted to go on his show but was being vetoed, is a new wrinkle in the Palin Chronicles.

Now that she has no obligations to the McCain campaign (or, really, the state of Alaska), she’s free to go on any program she pleases. And as we suspected, this was her hardest-hitting interview during this press push. While Barbara Walters was constrained by objectivity, O’Reilly was free to be harsh and opinionated. When Palin said, as she had several times this week, that she didn’t want to voice her campaign concerns to Sen. John McCain, O’Reilly jumped in. “Wait wait wait, you were frustrated and you’re not seeing their vision, don’t you think you should have gone to the presidential candidate and said, ‘Hey, they’re mismanaging me, you’ve got to let me loose’?” he asked.

Later, the conversation turned the iconic media moment of the campaign. “Katie Couric asked you an easy question and you booted it, Governor,” O’Reilly said bluntly. “Why did you boot it? If somebody asked what do you read, I’d say New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post I can reel them off in my sleep. You couldn’t do it?”

Here’s the full interview (well, part 1 – there’s two more parts coming Friday and Monday):

—–
» Follow Steve Krakauer on Twitter

Bill O'Reilly, fnc, fox news, Going Rogue, Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin Week, The O'Reilly Factor

http://glassbead.info Magister

Possible alternate headline: “O’Reilly Pens Palin a PR Primer”
TfT

Good first segment last night — tonight they will get into policy issues.

I think Sarah handled the Katie question quite well, although she refrained from using the term “the perky one” like she did on Oprah. I have seen some folks calling for CBS to release the entire unedited interviews with Palin (which they have never done) so the viewing public can see the full interaction, as opposed to the edits that Ms. Couric (the “annoying one”) and CBS put together in their efforts to undermine the first female Republican VP candidate.

I just got the book and look forward to reading what Palin herself says (“unfiltered”) about this CBS hit job. Republicans should learn a hard lesson from the media’s attacks on Mrs. Palin — never participate in an interview with MSM unless you have your own camera crew to record the segments yourself.
chuck

I’m not a Sarah Palin fan, but it’s nice to see her in an interview with someone who is not trying to attack her, so that we can actually here what she has to say.

I’m not sure that her focus on the past is very good for her future, though. This interview, like her book, detract from what John Tantillo (Fox News blogger and Palin fan) calls her “forward motion”–which is what made her interesting in the first place. http://blog.marketingdoctor.tv/2009/11/17/tantillos-brand-winner-and-loser-khalid-sheikh-mohammed-and-sarah-palin.aspx