John McCain Campaign Staff Calls Sarah Palin Book “Fiction”

Most are just calling the book toilet paper.

Sarah Palin now knows she can’t just write a book that pokes the eye of John McCain’s campaign staff without getting slapped back.  After all, the professionals in the business are not going to let her smear their images without taking her down a peg or two.  This is getting fun.

Top aides to Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign hit back at Sarah Palin Friday and Saturday, calling the former vice presidential nominee’s soon-to-be-released book “revisionist and self-serving” “fiction.” 

Campaign manager Steve Schmidt, who emerges as Palin’s nemesis in the advance excerpts that have surfaced from her forthcoming account of the campaign, “Going Rogue,” told POLITICO Saturday that Palin’s charges about him were made up. 

“It’s all fiction,” he said. 

With a laugh, the shaved-headed political operative asked: “Why is the bald guy always the villain?” 

Schmidt, Palin writes, was “grim-faced” and “cool,” and tried to pin the campaign’s troubles on what he claimed was Palin’s post-partum depression, and even went to so far as to try and dictate her diet. 

According to excerpts published on the Huffington Post, Palin “took in his rotund physique and noted that he used nicotine to keep his own cognitive connections humming along.” 

“I’m a forty-four year old, healthy, athletic woman raising five kids and governing a large state, I thought as his words faded into a background buzz. Sir, I really don’t know you yet. But you’ve told me how to dress, what to say, who to talk to, a lot of people not to talk to, who my heroes are supposed to be and we’re still losing. Now you’re going to tell me what to eat?” 

A top McCain strategist familiar with the exchange over Palin’s appearance said that Schmidt and campaign manager Rick Davis approached the vice presidential nominee about the matter because people on her plane were concerned about her weight loss. 

“We told her that her health came first and offered to get her a nutritionist,” said the strategist. 

More generally, Palin uses the book to note the “jaded aura” of the “professional political caste” guiding McCain: 

“But I did notice… funny things [about the handlers] that even Piper commented on — such as tumbling out of the bus in a pack, lighting cigarettes as they went so it looked like a walking smoke cloud with legs.” 

Palin also faults Schmidt for his penchant for profanity, writing that he warned her just before the vice-presidential campaign that “moderator Gwen Ifill is “going to f*** with you.”  

“I’m thinking, Why are you telling me this? Last minute… what’s the point? And no more f-bombs around Piper, please?”