Unreliable Sources: "Game Change" and Politico

*
As reliable sources of information concerning Sarah Palin, Game Change and Politico magazine would have to rank very near the bottom of the list.

Game Change is the new political book which has dominated media buzz for the past several days. Its authors are John Heilemann of New York magazine and TIME's Mark Halperin. New York mag and TIME are periodicals which consistently express the liberal point of view, and both have a history of publishing articles which are hypercritical of Sarah Palin.

The two authors appear to have been correct at least on one detail from their book. The fact that their revelation about Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's remarks regarding then-candidate Barack Obama was followed by a quick apology from Reid gives it credence. But their tidbit about former President Bill Clinton, who allegedly told the late Sen. Ted Kennedy that under different circumstances, Obama could be fetching them coffee, may not be factual. Bill Clinton is many things, but he's no racist. Even Dick Morris, a former Clinton political consultant, says in all of the years working with Bill Clinton, he never heard a single racist word out of him. If he had, Morris wouldn't be shy about making it public, as he has demonstrated with other revelations about Bill and Hillary Clinton from his days in their employ.

It's this hit or miss character of the stories in Game Change, together with what we know about Sarah Palin, a political figure we have followed closely since 2007, that calls what Heilemann and Halperin have written regarding the former governor into question. Though their sources seem to be spotty, their record of writing unfavorable articles about the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate demonstrate their eagerness to cast her in a harsh light.

Politico has been mildly critical to very critical of Gov. Palin, depending on the author. Most critical of all are Senior Political Writers Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith, while Mike Allen is just slightly less critical of the former governor. She gets somewhat less critical treatment from Roger Simon and Andy Barr. Politico often gets its facts wrong, and it rarely even makes an attempt to correct them when the truth comes out.

Consider that Politico was completely wrong about Sarah Palin charging the National Tea Party Convention a large speakers fee, as we reported last night. The magazine has been pushing that particular meme very hard recently.

Moreover, in the article "Steve Schmidt's war against Sarah Palin" written by Jeanne Cummings, there is this:

According to the book, Schmidt launched an aggressive search of campaign e-mail records to try to identify, punish and silence anyone inside the campaign who was smearing Palin.

He never found the guilty parties because at least one of them wasn’t working for him.

As reported in “Game Change,” the charge that Palin was a “Diva” was made by Wayne Berman, a former Bush fundraiser and long-time Republican operative in Washington who wasn’t working for the McCain-Palin campaign.

Berman may not have been under Schmidt's authority, but he absolutely was working for the McCain campaign. It took us all of two seconds with a search engine to find this page titled "Lobbyists for McCain" left over from the 2008 campaign:

Wayne Berman is John McCain’s National Finance Co-Chair. With a client list that includes Chevron, Texaco, and the American Petroleum Institute...

So a lobbyist for Big Oil and the API called Sarah Palin, who took on Big Oil as governor of Alaska,  a "diva." We're shocked! And the image of Schmidt laboring over a keyboard  to find the "guilty parties," given his history of trashing Sarah Palin, strikes us as similar to O.J. Simpson's tireless efforts to find the "real killer." 

We would recommend taking anything found between the covers of Game Change with the same grain of salt we take with everything we read in Politico. Even though they were right on Harry Reid, we're reminded that even a broken pocket watch is correct two times a day, and then only for about one second each time.

- JP