Palin Campaign Dominated by Old Bush Advisors

[Joanne98]

September 22nd, 2008 by Ron Chusid

The Washington Post provides more arguments for considering McCain/Palin to be running for a third Bush/Cheney term, reporting that many of their advisers are from the Bush administration.

When Gov. Sarah Palin flew home to Alaska for the first time since being named the Republican vice presidential nominee, she brought along at least half a dozen new advisers to conduct briefings, stage-manage her first television interview and help her prepare for a critical debate next month.

And virtually every member of the team shared a common credential: years of service to President Bush.

From Mark Wallace, a Bush appointee to the United Nations, to Tucker Eskew, who ran strategic communications for the Bush White House, to Greg Jenkins, who served as the deputy assistant to Bush in his first term and was executive director of the 2004 inauguration, Palin was surrounded on the trip home by operatives deeply rooted in the Bush administration.

The clutch of Bush veterans helping to coach Palin reflects a larger reality about Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign: Far from being a group of outsiders to the Republican Party power structure, it is now run largely by skilled operatives who learned their crafts in successive Bush campaigns and various jobs across the Bush government over the past eight years.

Many Republicans are happy about the increased discipline in the McCain campaign but others see the downside to the changes in his campaign:

Yet others, including some sympathetic Republicans, have begun to quietly question whether McCain and Palin are well served by strategists so firmly anchored in the Bush establishment when the candidates are presenting themselves as a “team of mavericks” and agents of change. One Republican with long-standing ties to the Bush administration described the situation as a paradox in which Palin is especially vulnerable.

“If the McCain campaign is trying to prop up Palin as its change agent, and its inoculation against the ‘third Bush term’ rap, then why on earth is she surrounded by a cast of Bush advisers?” said the Republican loyalist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Since she’s been selected, every single one of the senior aides that she’s brought on board had prominent roles in Bush’s White House or on his campaigns, or both.”
http://liberalvaluesblog.com/?p=4648