A highight

``On Wednesday, two top McCain campaign advisers said that the
clothing purchases for Ms. Palin and her family were a particular
source of outrage for them. As they portrayed it, Ms. Palin had been
advised by Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain aide, that she should buy
three new suits for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in
September and three additional suits for the fall campaign. The budget
for the clothes was anticipated to be from $20,000 to $25,000, the
officials said.

Instead, in a public relations debacle undermining Ms. Palin's image
as an everywoman hockey mom, bills came in to the Republican
National Committee for about $150,000, including charges of $75,062 at
Neiman Marcus and $49,425 at Saks Fifth Avenue. The bills included
clothing for Ms. Palin's family and purchases of shoes, luggage and
jewelry, the advisers said. ''

================================================== ====================
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/us...mccain.html?em

Internal Battles Divided McCain and Palin Camps

By ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/elisabeth_bumiller/index.html?inline=nyt-per

PHOENIX ? As a top adviser in Senator John McCain
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/john_mccain/index.html?inline=nyt-per?s
now-imploded campaign tells the story, it was bad enough that Gov. Sarah
Palin
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/sarah_palin/index.html?inline=nyt-per
of Alaska unwittingly scheduled, and then took, a prank telephone call
from a Canadian comedian posing as the president of France. Far worse,
the adviser said, she failed to inform her ticketmate about her rogue
diplomacy.

As a senior adviser in the Palin campaign tells the story, the charge is
absurd. The call had been on Ms. Palin?s schedule for three days and she
should not have been faulted if the McCain campaign was too clueless to
notice.

Whatever the truth, one thing is certain. Ms. Palin, who laughingly told
the prankster that she could be president ?maybe in eight years,? was
the catalyst for a civil war between her campaign and Mr. McCain?s that
raged from mid-September up until moments before Mr. McCain?s concession
speech on Tuesday night. By then, Ms. Palin was in only infrequent
contact with Mr. McCain, top advisers said.

?I think it was a difficult relationship,? said one top McCain campaign
official, who, like almost all others interviewed, asked to remain
anonymous. ?McCain talked to her occasionally.?

But Mr. McCain?s advisers also described him as admiring of Ms. Palin?s
political skills. He was aware of the infighting, they said, but it is
unclear how much he was inclined or able to stop it.

The tensions and their increasingly public airing provide a revealing
coda to the ill-fated McCain-Palin ticket, hinting at the mounting
turmoil of a campaign that was described even by many Republicans as
incoherent, negative and badly run.

For her part, Ms. Palin told reporters in Arizona on Wednesday morning
that ?there is absolutely no diva in me.?

Later in the day, she refused to address the strife within the
campaigns. ?I have absolutely no intention of engaging in any of the
negativity because this has been all positive for me,? she said, adding
that it was time to savor President-elect Barack Obama
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per?s
victory and ?not let the pettiness or maybe internal workings of a
campaign erode any of the recognition of this historic moment.?

As the ticketmate with a potentially brighter political future, Ms.
Palin has more at stake going forward than Mr. McCain, whose aides now
have an interest in blaming outside factors for their loss, making Ms.
Palin a tempting target. And even as the votes from the election were
still being counted, there were new recriminations, with Mr. McCain?s
aides suggesting that a Palin aide had leaked damaging information about
them to reporters.

The tensions were described in interviews with top aides to the two
campaigns who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not
want to be seen as disloyal to Mr. McCain?s effort at a difficult time.

Finger-pointing at the end of a losing campaign is traditional and to a
large degree predictable, as Mr. McCain himself acknowledged in a
prescient interview in July.

?Every book I?ve read about a campaign is that the one that won, it was
a perfect and beautifully run campaign with geniuses running it and
incredible messaging, et cetera,? Mr. McCain said then. ?And always the
one that lost, ?Oh, completely screwed up, too much infighting, bad
people, etcetera.? So if I win, I believe that historians will say, ?Way
to go, he fine-tuned that campaign, and he got the right people in the
right place and as the campaign grew, he gave them more responsibility.?
If I lose,? people will say, ? ?That campaign, always in disarray.? ?

The disputes between the campaigns centered in large part on the
Republican National Committee
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/republican_national_committee/index.html?inline=nyt-org?s
$150,000 wardrobe for Ms. Palin and her family, but also on what McCain
advisers considered Ms. Palin?s lack of preparation for her disastrous
interview with Katie Couric
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/katie_couric/index.html?inline=nyt-per
of CBS News and her refusal to take advice from Mr. McCain?s campaign.

But behind those episodes may be a greater subtext: anger within the
McCain camp that Ms. Palin harbored political ambitions beyond 2008.

As late as Tuesday night, a McCain adviser said, Ms. Palin was pushing
to deliver her own speech just before Mr. McCain?s concession speech,
even though vice-presidential nominees do not traditionally speak on
election night. But Ms. Palin met up with Mr. McCain with text in hand.
She was told no by Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain?s closest advisers,
and Steve Schmidt
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/steve_schmidt/index.html?inline=nyt-per,
Mr. McCain?s top strategist.

On Wednesday, two top McCain campaign advisers said that the clothing
purchases for Ms. Palin and her family were a particular source of
outrage for them. As they portrayed it, Ms. Palin had been advised by
Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain aide, that she should buy three new
suits for the Republican National Convention
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/r/republican_national_convention/index.html?inline=nyt-org
in St. Paul in September and three additional suits for the fall
campaign. The budget for the clothes was anticipated to be from $20,000
to $25,000, the officials said.

Instead, in a public relations debacle undermining Ms. Palin?s image as
an everywoman ?hockey mom,? bills came in to the Republican National
Committee for about $150,000, including charges of $75,062 at Neiman
Marcus and $49,425 at Saks Fifth Avenue. The bills included clothing for
Ms. Palin?s family and purchases of shoes, luggage and jewelry, the
advisers said.

The advisers described the McCain campaign as incredulous about the
shopping spree and said Republican National Committee lawyers were
likely to go to Alaska to conduct an inventory and try to account for
all that was spent.

Ms. Palin has defended her wardrobe as the idea of the Republican
National Committee and said that she would give it back.

?Those clothes, they are not my property,? she said. ?Just like the
lighting and the staging and everything else that the R.N.C. purchased.?

Advisers in the McCain campaign, in suggesting that Palin advisers had
been leaking damaging information about the McCain campaign to the news
media, said they were particularly suspicious of Randy Scheunemann, Mr.
McCain?s top foreign policy aide who had a central role in preparing Ms.
Palin for the vice-presidential debate
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/presidential_debates/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier.

As a result, two senior members of the McCain campaign said on Wednesday
that Mr. Scheunemann had been fired from the campaign in its final days.
But Rick Davis
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/rick_davis/index.html?inline=nyt-per,
the McCain campaign manager, and Mr. Salter, one of Mr. McCain?s closest
advisers, said Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had in fact not been
dismissed. Mr. Scheunemann, who picked up the phone in his office at
McCain campaign headquarters on Wednesday afternoon, responded that
?anybody who says I was fired is either lying or delusional or a whack job.?

Mr. Scheunemann was referring to widely disseminated criticism by Mr.
McCain?s advisers in the final days of the campaign that Ms. Palin, as
first reported in Politico, was a ?whack job.?

Whatever the permutations, the advisers said they strongly believed that
Mr. Scheunemann was disclosing, as one put it, ?a constant stream of
poison? to William Kristol
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/william_kristol/index.html?inline=nyt-per,
the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and a columnist for The
New York Times.

Mr. Kristol, who wrote a column on Oct. 13 calling on Mr. McCain to fire
his campaign because it was ?close to being out-and-out dysfunctional,?
said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that the campaign advisers
were paranoid. Mr. Kristol has been a strong supporter of Ms. Palin.

?I wasn?t writing poison,? Mr. Kristol said. He added: ?Randy
Scheunemann is a friend of mine and I think he did a good job. I talked
to him, but I talked to a lot of people at the campaign.?

The McCain camp was further upset about Ms. Palin?s interview with Ms.
Couric, which was broadcast at a time when Ms. Palin was meeting with
foreign leaders at the United Nations
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_nations/index.html?inline=nyt-org
and trying to establish some foreign policy credentials. Ms. Palin?s
wobbly and tongue-tied performance was mocked in an iconic impersonation
on ?Saturday Night Live?
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/saturday_night_live/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier
by Tina Fey
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/tina_fey/index.html?inline=nyt-per.

Ms. Palin, who had prepared for and survived an initial interview with
Charles Gibson
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/charles_gibson/index.html?inline=nyt-per
of ABC News, did not have the time or focus to prepare for Ms. Couric,
the McCain advisers said. ?She did not say, ?I will not prepare,? ? a
McCain adviser said. ?She just didn?t have a bandwidth to do a mock
interview session the way we had prepared before. She was just overloaded.?

One of the last straws for the McCain advisers came just days before the
election when news broke that Ms. Palin had taken a call made by
Marc-Antoine Audette. Mr. Audette and his fellow comedian Sebastien
Trudel are notorious for prank calls to celebrities and heads of state.

Ms. Palin appeared to believe that she was talking to President Nicolas
Sarkozy
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/nicolas_sarkozy/index.html?inline=nyt-per
of France, even though the prankster had a flamboyant French accent and
spoke to her in a more personal way than would be protocol in such a
call. At one point, he told Ms. Palin that she would make a good
president some day. ?Maybe in eight years,? she replied.

Julie Bosman and Michael Cooper contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 7, 2008
A picture caption with an article on Thursday about internal tensions
between the McCain and Palin camps during the election campaign carried
an incorrect date. The photograph, showing four of Senator John McCain?s
aides watching him speak, was taken Friday, Oct. 31, not Monday, Nov. 3.

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