Politico reports that Sarah Palin, and some of her long-time advisers, are frustrated with the way she's been handled by the former Bush aides assigned to run her VP campaign.
Palin has been increasingly off message and talking with reporters without consulting the aides tasked with keeping her away from the media. She blames the Bush aides for damaging her image by not letting her be herself and trying to too tightly script her interview with Katie Couric.
"She's lost confidence in most of the people on the plane," said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to "go rogue" in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.
"I think she'd like to go more rogue," he said.
The emergence of a Palin faction comes as Republicans gird for a battle over the future of their party: Some see her as a charismatic, hawkish conservative leader with the potential, still unrealized, to cross over to attract moderate voters. Anger among Republicans who see Palin as a star and as a potential future leader has boiled over because, they say, they see other senior McCain aides preparing to blame her in the event he is defeated.
"These people are going to try and shred her after the campaign to divert blame from themselves," a McCain insider said, referring to McCain's chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, and to Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush aide who has taken a lead role in Palin's campaign. Palin's partisans blame Wallace, in particular, for Palin's avoiding of the media for days and then giving a high-stakes interview to CBS News' Katie Couric, whose sometimes painful content the campaign allowed to be parceled out over a week.
With McCain's chances of winning the election dwindling, Palin could do herself a big favor by breaking with the campaign. Palin's best chance for rehabilitating her political career is to lay the ground work for her future. She needs to show the country who she really is over the next 11 days and then go back to Alaska and be a great governor. That's assuming who she really is isn't what we've seen of her so far.
