Sarah Palin Says John McCain “Had Some Strange People Around Him”

McCain’s former running mate is clearly still mad about her treatment.

Sarah Palin delivers a speech in 2008.Kiichiro Sato,/AP Photo

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Poor John McCain can’t die in peace without a last few digs from his former vice presidential running mate, Sarah Palin. While most of the political world was fondly remembering Sen. McCain and issuing sympathetic statements to his family, Palin took the opportunity to make his death all about her. She went on the click-happy British website DailyMailTV to vent—again—about her frustrations with his staff and advisors during and after the 2008 presidential campaign. 

She told the DailyMailTV that McCain lived in the Washington, DC, “bubble” and was out of touch with real people and, as a result, overly reliant on his advisers to tell him “what America really wanted.” She went on to say:

I don’t think inherently he necessarily was really connected, so he did rely on people telling him – in polls – telling him and…he went from there. 

I think that’s unfortunate because he had some strange people around him and..disloyal people, and you know, I don’t say that as like hate speech or griping about it, it’s just a fact they were just some not nice people.

The people to whom Palin is referring likely included Nicolle Wallace, who served as senior adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign in 2008 and is now a political commentator for MSNBC. Palin has been jousting with Wallace ever since she was assigned to help transform Palin from small-state governor to vice presidential candidate. Palin has been blaming Wallace for years for her disastrous performance on the campaign trail. Wallace, meanwhile, wrote a novel featuring a mentally ill female vice presidential candidate that many believed was a thinly veiled dig at Palin.

In her DailyMailTV interview, Palin did attempt to highlight some of McCain’s positive attributes, namely his military service. She told the DailyMailTV, “I’ll remember the good times, that’s for darn sure. And I won’t rehash the strange times that happened after the campaign that some of his people orchestrated.”

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate