Governor Palin Now A Laughing Stock Amongst Beltway Republicans Says The London Daily Telegraph

Back home from our Cornish cottage I had buttered the toast and was about to reach for my breakfast cup of tea when I glanced at my copy of the London Daily Telegraph and came across a particularly well informed article about Governor Palin from the DT’s ace correspondent in the USA, the brilliantly perceptive Alex Spillius.

Sarah Palin's hopes for presidency damaged by family feuds

She ran for the White House as a champion of old-fashioned family values, but Sarah Palin's own troublesome brood is putting another bid for high office at risk.

While Barack Obama has taken to the international stage with aplomb, the defeated vice-presidential Republican candidate returned to govern the wilderness of Alaska and a host of tribulations, many of them involving Levi Johnston, the father of her first grandchild.

Not quite sure that the President’s entry onto the “international stage” has been that graceful though I must admit his bow to the King of Saudi Arabia was very courtly...

The Palin family has become embroiled in an unbecoming public feud with Mr Johnston after he claimed on a leading TV chat show that the governor was well aware that he and Bristol were having sex under the roof of her Wasilla home.

Alex, you are so right – but isn’t that old news? What have you been doing these last 2/3 weeks?

But the governor's family problems don't end there. The half-sister of her husband Todd was then arrested after police accused her of breaking into a home to steal money for the second time in a week. Reports said she took her four-year-old daughter along for the ride

Shocking – Palin can’t even control her husband’s half sister…so much for “family values”. Great detective work, Alex – and while you’re at it there’s that business of the half brother being refused entry to the UK after reportedly being accused of an attempted sex attack on a 13-year-old girl on his last visit...oh sorry, Alex...wrong politician. That was Obama’s half brother...move along, nothing to see here...

Even her stellar popularity in Alaska, has fallen, from 80 per cent last summer to 60 per cent now. Her "very negative" numbers have shot up from three per cent to 20 per cent within the last six months.

OMG – she is doomed. Her job approval ratings are now only at a level higher than President Obama's...nobody in Alaska wants this trailer trash rube any more. I knew that calculator would come in handy one day, Alex...

Mrs Palin has had trouble balancing her commitments to the state and her national ambition. Organisers who had invited her to speak at a major Republican fund-raising dinner in Washington had to find a replacement when she double-booked. "She couldn't get her act together, it was real amateur hour stuff and it caused a lot of bad feeling in the party," said a leading Republican consultant in the capital.

Hey, you C4P guys – how come you didn’t tell us about the double booking and now see what has happened – you’ve upset that key figure Mr Leading Republican Consultant, you know, the guy who helped organise such a brilliant campaign last year.

But, just a minute, Alex – if she is such a loser why would they want her to appear at a major fundraising event...mmmm...difficult one, that, isn’t it, Alex...

Aged just 45, Mrs Palin has time on her side and her ambition remains a bid for the Republican 2012 nomination and the presidency. A fund-raising committee has already been started her name to gear up for the Iowa caucuses, and it claims to have been overwhelmed by the response.

That does it for me, RAM – how come I have been left out of the loop? Not only have I been kept at arm’s length from the mysterious Mr X who funds C4P but it’s obvious that Alex Spillius is really in with Meghan and privy to the inner circle of the Governor’s strategic advisors since he knows the Little Alaskan General has decided to go for the White House in 2012 – now that’s what I call real journalism...

Though she may retain much of the conservative grassroots popularity that briefly raised her running mate John McCain's hopes of becoming president, within powerful Republican circles she is becoming something of a laughing stock.

OK Alex, I see now why you didn’t bother to say anything about the reception she got in Evansville, Indiana the other evening – they’re just dimwits from outside the Beltway but at DC dinner parties oh how they laugh...so, now it’s time to go Associated Press – look for a well respected neutral figure to test your own assumptions

"Where is she heading? She is going to get her own reality show, not the White House," said John Feehery, a Republican consultant. "There a lot of big challenges in this country and how can she handle them if she can barely handle her own family?"

And there we have it – those powerful Republican circles, none more influential than John Feehery. Mr Feehery was, of course, a staffer for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who endorsed Mitt Romney last year. Though retired from politics he is still the Don Corleone of the GOP, a man who can make or break any aspiring politician with a mere flicker of his eyelid. Hastert also had no trouble handling his own family, especially his lobbyist son Joshua... Feehery’s connection with Hastert also makes him an expert on electioneering – just ask all those Republican candidates who disinvited Hastert from campaign appearances on their behalf in the 2006 election.

Yes, nobody better placed to give an opinion on Governor Palin than a Beltway lobbyist who blogs for CNN Politics and tells Republicans they can only beat Obama by liking him...

It’s not that I am really surprised by this overflowing dustbin of rubbish from Alex Spillius for today’s London Daily Telegraph. We had to put up with months of this misinformed “journalism” from him and his colleague Toby Harnden during the election campaign. The DT is, supposedly, a Conservative UK broadsheet but if I said David Brooks I think you’ll get the picture. It’s rather snooty, self important and pompous and, last August, it predictably greeted Governor Palin’s nomination with the heading “McCain chooses ex beauty queen as his running mate”, sustaining that characterisation from then on.

What puzzles me is why UK papers still keep paying hacks like Spillius for this sort of scribbling when, with a couple of flicks at my keyboard I can surf straight into American papers, watch US TV in real time and wander round a whole range of websites and blogs to keep abreast of the news. But then I realised that if I removed the DT title and the by line many Americans might well assume it to be taken from a US paper – indeed, in the time honoured tradition of hacks throughout the world some journalists could just as well have lifted it from The Hanksville Gazette, doing a bit of cut and paste before sending the copy to London.

It’s not just UK hacks that are too lazy (or too biased) to actually check their facts – I have long suspected it is a trait deeply embedded into the DNA of many journalists and, until the advent of the internet, there was no easy way of combating this slipshod conduct. But now it’s a different world and it’s not so easy for so called “professionals” to get away with it and, I must confess, payback feels good...