Bill O'Reilly comes out of the gate asking Sarah Palin to tell viewers why she didn't appear on The Factor during the 2008 campaign.
What follows is (like much of the past few days) a bit of a Palin smack-down on her former boss' operation.
O'REILLY: Let's begin this interview with a phone call you made to me, to my house late October 2008. We had been trying to get you on The Factor for months. Do you remember that?
PALIN: I do. Shh. That was part of that goin' rogue stuff. Nobody was supposed to know about in the campaign. You're spillin' the beans.
O'REILLY: .... you basically said to me "I wanna do the show", but why didn't you do it?
PALIN: Whatever the logistics were that weren't working out, we ended up not doing the show, unfortunately, but yeah, reachin' out to you and to others who I believed would report fairly, objectively on the campaign. Wanted to talk to you guys.
O'REILLY: We couldn't figure it out.... why couldn't we get you, and we had trouble getting Senator McCain on the program, I didn't get it.
PALIN: The media strategy was a bit perplexing, for at least those on the vice-presidential side of the ticket. I'm not really understanding where we were going on there with the relationships with the media.
It was an indication of maybe some things in our campaign being out of touch with the normal, everyday, average American who wanted to truly connect with the candidates.
[Later]
O'REILLY: It's fair to say that you were over-controlled by the McCain people.
PALIN: They were the experts. They had run national campaigns before, and of course, I had never been a participant in anything larger than a state campaign. So obviously having to put a lot of faith in their strategy and not having a whole lot to say on things like the media roll-out.
What's fascinating is how Palin is starting to steer some blame for the election results onto how she was handled.
Earlier this week, she said it didn't matter: that the economy doomed the campaign.
But note the shift in the dynamics -- she's introducing the notion that maybe the Veep would have been a more capable hand at the helm.
"The media strategy was a bit perplexing, for at least those on the vice-presidential side of the ticket. I'm not really understanding where we were going on there with the relationships with the media.
It was an indication of maybe some things in our campaign being out of touch with the normal, everyday, average American who wanted to truly connect with the candidates."
