The Blog @ Spolitics

Is the Press Trying to Push Palin Off The Ticket?

According to reports, the addition of Sarah Palin to the McCain ticket has energized the base and raised millions of dollars in donations. But that’s not the way things are in the world according to Atlantic.com’s Joshua Green. According to him, “Since Friday, when the pick was announced, news surrounding Palin has been almost uniformly negative.”

In fact, in Green’s world, things are so bad for Palin she’s in jeopardy of getting booted off the ticket. What leads him to believe that?

Here in St. Paul, talk of Palin has dominated the Republican convention—even more so than cable news—and by Monday night discussion among Republican operatives and reporters had turned to whether Palin would survive or become the first running mate since Thomas Eagleton in 1972 to leave a major-party ticket.

The NY Times was looking for this on Monday, too, but they reported that “there was no sign that her formal nomination this week was in jeopardy.”

According to Ben Smith, it’s the Democrats who are pushing the Eagleton angle. No surprise there, but it does make one wonder if the “discussions” between reporters and Republicans that Green refers to consisted of reporters asking if Palin would get dropped from the ticket and the Republicans answering no.

You expect the press to dig into Palin’s record, but not to giggle with glee like kids on an Easter egg hunt. They don’t even seem to be concerned with whether or not they’re finding anything voters should be concerned about. Instead, they only seem to care if all together it’s enough to earn her the boot, like they’re playing a game to see if they can get John McCain to drop her from the ticket.

I suspect they’ll have the same success they had when they tried this with Dick Cheney back in ‘04. And for the record, both NY Times articles were written by Elisabeth Bumiller. Apparently this is a pastime of hers.

Update: According to the McCain Campaign’s Steve Schmidt: “We are being bombarded by e-mails and phone calls from journalists asking when she will be dropping out of the race.”

Update: I originally missed this but it’s worth adding. A NY Times Op-Ed suggested Palin should withdraw from the ticket to “minimize her own humiliation.”