Former McCain Adviser Nicolle Wallace Trashes Sarah Palin on 'The View'

Nicolle Wallace, former adviser to the McCain-Palin 2008 presidential campaign who worked with Steve Schmidt, appeared on The View on Thursday and gushed over Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and even Bill Clinton. Predictably, however, she trashed Sarah Palin.

Wallace has tried to blame Palin for the incompetence she and the McCain team displayed during the 2008 campaign against then-Senator Barack Obama. 

The program played a clip from Game Change, which has been called out for numerous lies and inaccuracies, that allowed Wallace to whack Palin as someone who had a “gap in her knowledge” about issues. She didn’t mention that if there were any gaps, it was her responsibility as her chief adviser to fill them. Wallace blamed the McCain campaign’s loss on Palin’s interview with Katie Couric, leaving out that Wallace is Couric’s friend and that the interview–which was heavily edited–took place over multiple days.

Wallace also did not mention Palin’s prescient words on the campaign trail in 2008 when she predicted that if Obama were elected, Russia’s Vladimir Putin may invade Ukraine.

Palin said in 2008 of Ukraine:

After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.

Wallace did not have trouble praising Chris Christie and Jeb Bush, both of whom she said were well-tested for potential presidential runs. She even said that Bill Clinton’s past would not hurt Hillary Clinton should she run for president because “that’s baked in the cake” before saying that to know Bill Clinton is “to love Bill.” She also stated that Jeb Bush, for whom she worked, would be a great presidential nominee because he knows what it is like to run for president. Of course, Jeb Bush himself has never done so and may not quite understand how quickly the modern news cycle has evolved, a problem the Clintons encountered while stumbling during the 2008 campaign. 

Barbara Walters was also on the program Thursday. Breitbart News reported last year that she had asked Palin to appear on her show less than a month before Walters defended Bill Maher’s vicious attacks on Sarah Palin’s special needs son. Maher mocked Trig Palin by referring to him as “retarded” during a June 8, 2013, Las Vegas show:

When Palin’s schedule did not allow for her to guest host, Palin’s advisers left the invitation as an open question. This backstory makes Walters’s refusal to defend Palin’s special needs son, Trig, from Bill Maher’s “retarded” attacks even more interesting.

Walters, who grew up with a special needs sister, said on June 17 on The View that she did not think Maher was “mean-spirited” when he referred to Palin’s son as “retarded.” Walters speculated that Maher did not know the word could be hurtful. Maher, it should be noted, has had a history of making degrading and malicious comments toward women and kids with special needs. And as Breitbart News’ John Nolte pointed out, even Walters’s in-studio audience was not buying this defense and was left silent. 

Wallace, as Breitbart News reported, has been trashing Palin since 2008 in an attempt to cover up her and Schmidt’s failures in the 2008 campaign:

But the greatest act of malpractice–perhaps in the history of any presidential campaign–was when Schmidt, Wallace, and McCain’s mercenaries decided to go “all in” on September 24, 2008 when the financial crisis hit and the nation was deciding between the inexperienced first-term senator and McCain. That moment presented voters with an opportunity to see who could best handle such an unexpected crisis. 

McCain suspended his campaign, went to Washington, D.C. without having read a three-page paper which outlined the terms of TARP, and was outclassed by Obama to the point where the average voter began to trust the inexperienced Chicago politician as someone who could be a competent manager of the nation’s economy. Meanwhile, the nation saw McCain’s disastrous performance and viewed him as erratic and borderline senile. Of course, McCain is competent and not senile, but his campaign mercenaries ignominiously made him look like he was, just like they would make Palin seem the caricature she was not. 

It was after this moment of ineptitude that the election was, for all intents and purposes, over. And it was then that the paid mercenaries had to hatch a plan to save their faces and reputations and cover up their incompetence so that they would not be laughed at and run out of town.