Game Change_ Obama And The Clintons, McCain And Palin, And The Race Of A Lifetime Part 21

The first signs of trouble appeared immediately after the convention, when the campaign staff began digging in a systematic way into Palin's background, and noticed that she had a tendency to shade the truth. Had she really said "thanks, but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere? Well, no. Had she really sold the state jet on eBay? Not exactly. Had she and Todd really been without health insurance until he got his union card? Actually, the story was more complicated. At McCain HQ, a white board was set up with a list of controversies the press was exploring, from Troopergate (which the Palins unvaryingly called "Tasergate," a reference to one of the more lurid details of the case) to the charge that, as mayor of Wasilla, Palin had sanctioned requiring women to pay for their own rape-exam kits. The campaign quickly discovered that consulting her about any issue on the board invariably yielded a sanitized version of reality.

Another source of concern was Palin's lack of fealty to the commitments she'd made to Schmidt and Salter the night before her selection. Palin had promised to support McCain's positions, even those she disagreed with. But one day in September, when the campaign arranged an elaborate and expensive setup for her to shoot a pro-stem-cell-research television ad, she showed up and refused to read her lines. You should have sent me the script before, Palin declared. I'm not saying this.

Palin had also pledged to banish Alaska temporarily from her thoughts and concentrate on the task at hand. But she and Todd were fixated on her reputation in the state, concerned that her image was taking a beating in Alaska because of the wave of attacks on her. They wanted the campaign to run television ads there, though Alaska was solidly Republican and money was tight in McCainworld. Todd griped about how few McCain-Palin yard signs he saw when he drove around back home. Sarah voiced so much anxiety over her gubernatorial approval ratings that Schmidt promised to commission a poll in Alaska to prove that her fears were groundless.

Then there was the matter of Palin's substantive deficiencies. On September 10, she was preparing to fly back to Alaska to see her son Track s.h.i.+p off to Iraq and to tape her first network interview with ABC News's Charlie Gibson. Before the flight to Anchorage, Schmidt, Wallace, and other members of her traveling party met Palin at the Ritz-Carlton near Reagan airport, in Pentagon City, Virginia-and found that, although she'd made some progress with her memorization and studies, her grasp of rudimentary facts and concepts was minimal. Palin couldn't explain why North and South Korea were separate nations. She didn't know what the Fed did. Asked who attacked America on 9/11, she suggested several times that it was Saddam Hussein. Asked to identify the enemy that her son would be fighting in Iraq, she drew a blank. (Palin's horrified advisers provided her with scripted replies, which she memorized.) Later, on the plane, Palin said to her team, "I wish I'd paid more attention to this stuff."

But after cramming furiously, Palin managed to emerge intact from the Gibson interview-stumbling only over whether she agreed with the "Bush doctrine" ("In what respect, Charlie?") and in discussing why the proximity of Alaska to Russia afforded her insight into its behavior on the world stage ("They're our next door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska").

Now, with the convention and a network interview behind her, Palin had just the last of her three major hurdles left to surmount: the vice-presidential debate on October 2 at Was.h.i.+ngton University in St. Louis. It was obvious that she would need to spend much of her time on Biden prep, but McCainworld believed it couldn't simply bunker Palin and have her disappear from public view. She was a star, a sensation, and the press was howling that, Gibson or no, she was being sheltered from cross-examination.

Hence the decision to grant Couric a multi-part interview. As CBS promoted and unspooled the segments over the following week, Palin could go dark to study while keeping her visibility high.

What no one realized was how severely Palin's bandwidth was constricted; her road show was becoming a traveling circus-c.u.m-soap opera. Her children-a pregnant, hormonal young woman; a lively teenage girl; a rambunctious child; a special-needs infant; and a son just decamped for Iraq-consumed a vast amount of her psychic energy. Her focus on Alaska (and especially the Alaskan media, with which she had been friendly but which she was now certain was turning against her) and her attempts to prepare for her meetings with world leaders devoured even more. One of Palin's private email accounts was hacked, and the gossip website Gawker posted messages that she'd sent, as well as Bristol's cell phone number. And on the season premiere of Sat.u.r.day Night Live Sat.u.r.day Night Live, on September 13, Tina Fey debuted her withering, hilarious, uncanny caricature of Palin, mocking her interview with Gibson: "I can see Russia from my house!"

All of this had taken a toll on Palin by the time Wallace sat down with her at the Broadway Millennium. Wallace's husband, Mark, a former Bush campaign official who was also part of Palin's team, had warned his wife about a phenomenon that he and others thought of as "the two Sarahs." One minute, Palin would be her perky self; the next, she would fall into a strange, blue funk. With prep going nowhere, Nicolle decided it was best to put Palin in a positive state of mind. She cooed over the governor's wardrobe for the next day and said they'd get down to business again in the morning at six o'clock.

When Wallace returned bright and early, she found Palin in a pink bathrobe, her eyes gla.s.sy and dead. The candidate was furious and embarra.s.sed about a report in The New York Times The New York Times detailing how the press had been blocked from the first few minutes of her meeting the day before with Afghan president Hamid Karzai. As hair and makeup stylists worked on Palin, Wallace ran through potential interview questions. The candidate was unresponsive. Wallace read Palin the newspaper. The candidate sat in silence. After two futile hours, as they were about to set off to meet Couric, Palin announced, "I hate this makeup"-smearing it off her face, messing up her hair, complaining that she looked fat. Wallace, in a panic, summoned a makeup artist to ride in the motorcade and repair the damage. detailing how the press had been blocked from the first few minutes of her meeting the day before with Afghan president Hamid Karzai. As hair and makeup stylists worked on Palin, Wallace ran through potential interview questions. The candidate was unresponsive. Wallace read Palin the newspaper. The candidate sat in silence. After two futile hours, as they were about to set off to meet Couric, Palin announced, "I hate this makeup"-smearing it off her face, messing up her hair, complaining that she looked fat. Wallace, in a panic, summoned a makeup artist to ride in the motorcade and repair the damage.

On the drive across town to meet Couric at the U.N., Palin could speak of little else besides the Alaska poll that Schmidt had promised but she suspected had never been conducted. I'm trying to trust you people, Palin said to Wallace, but how can can I trust you? I trust you?

Palin and Couric greeted each other cordially and then taped the first two segments of the series: a sit-down interview and a walk-and-talk outside the U.N. Everyone in earshot understood immediately the scale of the disaster.

Palin's answers about the bailout were halting and incoherent. When Couric asked her to name examples of McCain's efforts to regulate the economy, Palin said, "I'll try to find some and bring them to you." Asked again about the relevance of Russia's closeness to Alaska, she replied, "As Putin rears his head and comes into the airs.p.a.ce of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska." Asked to name a Supreme Court case, besides Roe v. Wade Roe v. Wade, that she disagreed with, Palin awkwardly hedged-"Of course in the great history of America there have been rulings that there's never going to be absolute consensus by every American"-and then came up empty.

A snippet from the interviews aired on CBS that night, but in the clamor over McCain's campaign suspension, n.o.body noticed. The next morning, Couric went on the network's Early Show Early Show to promote her exclusive, commenting mildly that Palin wasn't always responsive in replying to certain questions. to promote her exclusive, commenting mildly that Palin wasn't always responsive in replying to certain questions.

At that moment, Wallace was in the middle of an appearance on Today Today and felt her cell phone vibrate madly. As she left NBC, she checked and saw that Palin had been calling nonstop. Soon enough, the governor called again. and felt her cell phone vibrate madly. As she left NBC, she checked and saw that Palin had been calling nonstop. Soon enough, the governor called again.

Katie said I struggled to answer questions! Palin shouted.

Wallace held her tongue.

Palin shouted again, Are you listening? listening?

I'm listening, said Wallace. You did struggle to answer a lot of questions.

I don't know what you guys are trying to do to me, Palin fumed. Why did you make me do Katie?

For the next twenty minutes, as Wallace walked the thirteen blocks back to her apartment, Palin screamed and Wallace yelled back. The reason the interview sucked was because you didn't try, Wallace said. You didn't show up and you didn't fight. The reason Gibson worked out is because even if you didn't know every answer, you clawed your way through the whole thing.

Wallace could barely fathom Palin's hissy fit and her attempt to blame others for her failure to prepare. Wallace had been Palin's closest confidante in McCainworld, but now Nicolle was through with her-and the feeling was mutual.

Palin thought Wallace and McCainworld had tossed her into the lioness's mouth, that Couric had been bound and determined to devour her. She wanted nothing more to do with network anchors, especially since they got in the way of her talking to Alaska reporters. "I want to do what I want to do," Palin said stubbornly to Wallace. "Now I know what Hillary meant when she said she had to find her voice."

THAT AFTERNOON, PALIN LEFT New York and flew to Philadelphia to spend the next week concentrating on debate prep. She and her team-led by Mark Wallace and including Tucker Eskew and Steve Biegun-checked into the Westin downtown, took over a conference room, and got to work.

The next two days, by all accounts, were a total train wreck. Never before had Palin's team seen her so profoundly out of sorts for such a sustained period. She wasn't eating (a few small bites of steak a day, no more). She wasn't drinking (maybe half a can of Diet Dr Pepper; no water, ever). She wasn't sleeping (not much more than a couple of hours a night, max). The index cards were piling up by the hundreds, but Palin wasn't absorbing the material written on them. When her aides tried to quiz her, she would routinely shut down-chin on her chest, arms folded, eyes cast to the floor, speechless and motionless, lost in what those around her described as a kind of catatonic stupor.

Some on her staff believed that Palin was suffering from postpartum depression or thwarted maternal need. (Again and again, she talked about Trig, who most of the time was back in Alaska with Todd. I miss my baby, Sarah would say, I miss sleeping with my baby.) Others pointed to the Couric interview, the second excruciating slice of which aired the Thursday night they arrived in Philly, subjecting Palin to more ridicule. Still others cited the sheer magnitude of the pressure she was under, given her oft-expressed sense of obligation not to let McCain down, an apparent fear of humiliation, and the searing scrutiny she was receiving.

Wallace, with a sense of desperation setting in, tried to buck Palin up. Sure, they were in a rough patch, he said, but it was worth it, right?

"No," Palin answered darkly. "If I'd known everything I know now, I would not have done this."

On Sat.u.r.day, September 27, Wallace sent an urgent SOS to McCain headquarters. On a call with Schmidt, Davis, and Salter, he described how Palin was performing, how dire the circ.u.mstances were, especially with the debate just five days away. They began discussing a new and threatening possibility: that Palin was mentally unstable.

Schmidt had heard that Palin was accusing him of lying about the Alaska poll-in fact, it had been conducted; her approval rating was in the seventies-which led him to believe that she was becoming irrational. He and Davis planned to take the train to Philadelphia the next day to a.s.sess the situation themselves.

Given the acuteness of Wallace's concern, McCain's advisers felt they had to bring the candidate into the loop that Sat.u.r.day. Bluntly, they described to him their unease about Palin's mental state. McCain suggested that they move the debate prep to his spread in Sedona. Give her room to breathe. Let her bring her family. A change of scenery might do her good. Cindy would be there to support Palin, and a doctor friend of the McCains would be on hand to observe her.

Schmidt and Davis weren't the only McCainiacs who trekked to the Westin on Sunday. Wallace had also summoned Joe Lieberman, to help Palin grasp elements of foreign policy, and also to get an outside perspective on whether she was doing as badly as he thought. A month earlier, when McCain informed Lieberman that he'd lost out to Palin in the veepstakes, Lieberman had been disappointed, if unsurprised, but more confused than anything. He was so unfamiliar with Palin that he mixed her up momentarily with Linda Lingle, the Jewish Republican governor of Hawaii; after all, "Sarah" was was a Hebrew name. a Hebrew name.

Lieberman had met Palin at the convention in St. Paul and established a bit of a rapport with her-another reason for him to be at the Westin. But the Palin he saw now scarcely resembled the confident, bra.s.sy woman he'd watched bring audiences close to rapture on the trail. She was sitting there being fed questions, saying virtually nothing, to the point where her coaches asked Lieberman to take the lectern and start answering instead.

Schmidt and Davis arrived and were appalled by the scene they found. The room was hot and claustrophobic; the shades were drawn. The place was full of half-eaten hotel food and stank of moldering french fries. Palin, looking dazed, was surrounded, as usual, by stacks and stacks of index cards.

Schmidt cleared the room and said to Palin, Governor, the debate's on Thursday and this isn't working. We're going to move the show to Sedona and we're going to fix it. The Katie Couric interview did not go well, and it didn't go well because you didn't prepare; and there can never be another instance of something not going well because of that. You're not the first politician to have a bad interview. Ronald Reagan said that trees cause pollution and went on to be a great president. No one will remember this stuff if we have a good debate.

Schmidt thought Palin looked thin and drawn. Your road crew tells me that you're not sleeping, he said. No one running for the office of vice president should be getting less than eight hours of sleep a night. If you need to take sleeping pills, you should.

Schmidt then brusquely brought up Palin's weight. It's my understanding that you might be on the Atkins diet, he said. That goofy diet is bad for you. I want you off it today. I'm alarmed by your weight loss and it's noticeable even in just a couple weeks. In order to perform at your highest level, you have to have a balanced diet.

Palin offered not a word of protest.

When Schmidt finished, he walked out in the hall and b.u.t.tonholed Lieberman. "She's down," Schmidt said. "This whole process is affecting her confidence."

Lieberman couldn't have agreed more, although he wasn't sure that having a former VP nominee show off his debating chops was the best way to build Palin up. The situation was wildly unconventional already: a Democratic senator being imported into a top-secret lockdown to a.s.sist a Republican vice-presidential candidate whose mental stability was in question. Now Schmidt asked Lieberman to perform another unorthodox intervention.

"You're both very religious," Schmidt said. "Go in there and pray with her."

As it happened, Palin had already been prayed for that day. A group of Republican congresswomen had offered their blessings via conference call with her. But Lieberman went back and took a less direct tack, providing Palin with Talmudic wisdom. Invoking the influential Orthodox rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, he spoke about the covenant of faith, which is the relations.h.i.+p between G.o.d and man, and the covenant of destiny, which is what men make of themselves.

"Look," Lieberman said kindly, "you gotta be saying to yourself, 'What am I doing here? How did this happen?' This is your moment to make it really count for something."

Palin seemed touched. "Joe," she said. "I can't figure any other reason I'm here except that I was meant to be here."

Palin's immediate rendezvous with destiny was in Ohio the next day, where she stopped on the way to Sedona to join McCain for a rally and to tape the final parts of her interview with Couric. Palin wanted to blow off Katie, but the campaign felt that doing so would be a PR nightmare. Palin acquiesced, but not entirely. Rather than prepping for Couric, she allowed herself to become consumed by a different media opportunity: a questionnaire from the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, the local Wasilla newspaper, which she insisted on filling out herself. Hours before she was scheduled to meet Couric, Palin emailed several members of her team, "How 'bout I do the Katie interview after I get the Frontiersman interview questions and reply to them? It's been my priority."

The irony was rich, therefore, when the question of Couric's that tripped up Palin that day was one about her reading habits: What newspapers and magazines did she read to stay abreast of the world? "Most of them," Palin said. Specifically? "All of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years." Can you name a few? "I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too," Palin said. "Alaska isn't a foreign country."

Debate camp commenced that night in Sedona with an outdoor buffet hosted by Cindy. Palin was thrilled to see her family and spent much of the time cradling Trig, but beyond that, she was subdued. To prevent leaks about the ongoing crisis, Schmidt had drastically narrowed the circle around Palin, cutting out much of her staff and foregoing the idea of a professional politician to stand in for Biden. (Randy Scheunemann, one of her foreign policy tutors from St. Paul, was a.s.signed the job.) Davis had pleaded with Mark McKinnon, who had decided to sit out the general election because he wanted no part of flaying Obama, to ride to their rescue; he agreed, but just for that one night.

After dinner, they all retreated to a small room tightly packed with two lecterns and a camera, in one of the McCain compound's guest buildings. A run-through was attempted, in which Palin kept getting lost fifteen seconds into her answers, stopping suddenly and saying, No, no, wait, let me start over, or, Shoot, I don't know this.

The session ended after an hour. Schmidt, Mark Wallace, and McKinnon stepped outside into the cool desert air, the night pitch black around them.

"What do you think?" Wallace asked McKinnon.

"Oh. My. G.o.d."

The next day, Schmidt decreed the banishment of Palin's hundreds of index cards. Instead, she was given twenty-five or thirty containing full-blown questions and answers, based on her team's best guesses at what the debate queries would be, along with scripted pivots out of dangerous territory and onto safer ground. There was no time for Palin to learn enough to be turned into Jeane Kirkpatrick in the next forty-eight hours. But after seeing her handle the prompter malfunction at the convention, Team McCain knew that she had an impressive capacity for learning by rote.

They moved the lecterns outside and set them up by the creek for daytime rehearsals. Between sessions, Palin, dressed in a hockey jersey and soccer shorts, would go off by herself, sit on the porch or on a swing under a tree, and study up on her preset questions, committing the answers to memory.

The change of venue and routine seemed to have an effect. That night, Palin made it all the way through her formal run-through. When she finished, the room broke into applause. Priscilla Shanks, the speech coach who had worked with Palin at the convention, shouted out, "She's back! She's back!"

Schmidt and Wallace took a dimmer, more angst-ridden view. Outside Sedona, the stakes around the debate had continued to rise. On October 1, the night before the showdown, CBS ran the last, and arguably the worst, of the Couric clips: the one featuring Palin's m.u.f.fed Supreme Court answer. The previous Sat.u.r.day, Tina Fey had unleashed her second stab at Palin on SAL, in a sketch spoofing the initial Couric sit-down, using nearly identical language to what the nominee had said about the bailout bill; a devastating mash-up juxtaposing the reality with the parody was zooming around the Web. And while Palin's performance in prep had improved markedly, she was still committing howlers that, if let loose during the debate, would be cataclysmic events.

She also continued to stumble over an unavoidable element: her rival's name. Over and over, Palin referred to Obama's running mate as "Senator Obiden"-or was it "O'Biden"?-and the corrections from her team weren't sticking. Finally, three staffers, practically in unison, suggested, Why don't you just call him Joe?

Palin stared at them quizzically and said, "But I've never met him."

IN FAR-OFF DELAWARE, things were running more smoothly, at least on the surface. At the Sheraton Suites Hotel in Wilmington, the opposing side had taken over the second floor and transformed it into a down-to-the-millimeter replica of the debate stage in St. Louis. The height of the lecterns. The distance between them. The lighting. The color scheme. All of it was identical to the real thing. And then the Obamans and Bidenettes saw the press pictures of Palin rehearsing in her gym shorts by a tree. They had to laugh.

But only for a second. Then they went back to being tied up in knots with fear that Joe would botch his big moment.

It wasn't hard to imagine how it could happen. The expectations for Palin were subterranean, while the bar for Biden was set around Jupiter. There wasn't much to win here, in other words, but there was plenty to lose-and there were at least two obvious ways that Biden could do it. He might be condescending to Palin because he thought she was an ignoramus. Or he might be patronizing to her as a woman, which, given Joe's old-school Sinatraesque tendencies, was just as likely.

The Obamans were pus.h.i.+ng a simple strategy: Ignore Palin. Don't engage her. Whatever happens, don't let her lure you down any rabbit holes with her crazy syntax and run-on sentences.

But Joe couldn't resist-not at first. A week or two before the three days of formal debate camp started on September 29, the campaign put him through his paces in a mock run-through against Anita Dunn. She played the part by reading from a script a.s.sembled almost entirely out of verbatim Palin quotes. That's too incoherent, Biden exclaimed. Is that really what she says? No, that can't be her answer. But, I mean, she's not saying anything. How am I supposed to respond to that, folks?

And into the rabbit hole he went.

It only got worse once they brought in the actual stand-in for Palin, the governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm. Lithe and alluring like Palin, Granholm came with talking points and a strategy, having glutted herself on YouTube videos of Palin's Alaska debates. Pus.h.i.+ng the readiness regimen past the point of absurdity, the Obamans ran Granholm through her own pre-prep prep against a fake Biden. The result was a perfect Palin: charming, folksy, disciplined, flirty-and mean.

Biden's first sessions with Granholm were bad enough to put a scare into Axelrod and Plouffe. Biden was in Meet the Press Meet the Press mode, ponderous and long-winded. Granholm, aware that family was Biden's soft spot, made cracks about his son Hunter's lobbying history, and Joe turned defensive. When Granholm dangled bait by playing dumb, he turned scornful and chauvinistic. mode, ponderous and long-winded. Granholm, aware that family was Biden's soft spot, made cracks about his son Hunter's lobbying history, and Joe turned defensive. When Granholm dangled bait by playing dumb, he turned scornful and chauvinistic.

But Biden worked diligently with Michael Sheehan, who trained him using what Sheehan-with due generational aptness-dubbed an "Arthur Murray pattern." Describe the situation; explain how it will be worse under McCain; describe how it'll be better under us. One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. Biden quickly got the hang of it.

He also figured out other means of avoiding rabbit holes. In one session, Granholm was tossing in non sequiturs-explanations that started nowhere and ended up even farther off the map-when she tried to entice Joe into hole-diving with an answer on race that concluded with a wayward reference to Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.

Biden paused. "I really have nothing to add to that."

By the night of the debate, the Obamans were expressing confidence, but their doubts weren't far beneath the surface.

"You feel like he's ready?" Obama asked Dunn an hour before the debate.

"He's totally ready," Dunn a.s.sured him (and herself).

"You know," Obama said, "I think I'm just going to watch this by myself."

The debate began with its best-known moment: Palin striding onstage in a fitted black suit, extending a hand to Biden, and saying, "Hey, can I call you Joe?" From there, the next ninety minutes unfolded as almost no one expected they would. Neither Palin nor Biden gaffed. Neither said anything egregiously stupid. Neither went for the other's throat, as both aimed their shots at the top of the opposite ticket.

When it was over, the Obamans exhaled and Biden was triumphal. Coming off the stage, he said to his aides, "You guys owe me. You don't know how much restraint that took."

McCainworld was ecstatic. Five days earlier, many of them had feared that Palin's psychological fragility might lead to a fiasco. Palin had not only survived, but fought Biden to something like a draw. In their suite at the Four Seasons, the Palins stayed up past midnight celebrating, drinking champagne, talking about what came next. More rallies. More rope lines. And more attacks on Obama.

Let's go, let's go, let's go, Palin said. Let's get out there and win this election!

THE DEBATE PROPELLED HER back onto the trail with a fresh head of steam, a renewed sense of confidence, and an appet.i.te for Obama's jugular. On October 4, The New York Times The New York Times provided Palin an opportunity to capitalize on all three when it published a front-page article about the topic that Hillary Clinton always believed would come back to bite Obama: former Weather Underground subversive William Ayers. provided Palin an opportunity to capitalize on all three when it published a front-page article about the topic that Hillary Clinton always believed would come back to bite Obama: former Weather Underground subversive William Ayers.

Though the story concluded that Obama and Ayers "do not appear to have been close," the next day McCainworld instructed Palin by email to lay into the Democratic nominee as "someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country." Palin eagerly agreed, and, with a few syntactical tweaks, delivered the message as written.

For McCainworld, it would be one of the precious few times in the election's final month that Palin stuck to the script. With the debate-related tumult behind them and any possibility gone that Palin would be a game changer, McCain's strategists hoped that she would continue to be useful in firing up the base and not create too many disruptions or distractions. But it wasn't long before the signs appeared that Palin was going rogue.

The most widely publicized example was an interview she gave to the Times Times's in-house conservative columnist, William Kristol, on October 5, the same day she thrashed Obama for "palling around with terrorists." When Kristol asked why, if Ayers was on the table, Reverend Wright was not, Palin said that Obama's pastor should be fair game and implicitly criticized McCain for not leading the charge. McCain was rarely bothered when Palin scampered off message, mainly because he did the same so often himself. But this was an exception. He'd drawn a hard line around Wright and couldn't understand why his running mate would have crossed it.

At the same time, Palin was waging a persistent internal crusade to reverse one of the campaign's major strategic decisions. On the day of the VP debate, McCainworld let it be known that it was pulling its resources out of Michigan, a key battleground state that it had determined was out of reach in the wake of the financial crisis. Palin had visited there more than once, thought she connected with its blue-collar voters and could put the state back in play, and lobbied to be allowed to return. When her traveling chief of staff, Andrew Smith, pointed out to her that McCain, Schmidt, and Davis had reached their conclusion on the basis of complex calculations involving the polls and the budget, Palin simply shrugged and uttered one of her signature phrases: "I know what I know what I know."

Regardless of what Palin thought she knew, Schmidt and Davis turned her down flat about venturing back into Michigan. But Palin refused to give in, sending email after email suggesting ways that she could squeeze a visit to the Wolverine State into her schedule. "It's a cheap four hour drive from [Wisconsin], I'll pay for the gas," Palin wrote to the senior staff on October 8. "I'd just be sleeping at that midnight drivetime anyway."

She was emerging as a big-time control freak. With her family now accompanying her most everywhere, making air-travel logistics a pain, she directed the campaign to "schedule bus transportation instead of flights wherever possible, even if that means late night drives in the bus." She became maniacal about monitoring her media coverage; she was constantly channel-surfing and blogosphere mining, and when she came across any mention that was less than flattering, she insisted that her staff try to have it corrected. Palin also showed an unusual wariness about the politicians and donors brought aboard her campaign plane and bus, insisting that she prescreen them before their seats were confirmed. "I want to google them myself so I can know my comfort level," she emailed her team on October 9. "Photos, etc with them may come back to haunt me if I can't vet these folks myself."

Palin's concern with such appearances was seen by some as an indication that she already had her sights set on 2012. But in truth, she and Todd continued to be far more preoccupied by her status in Alaska than just about anything else. Any issue related to the state put them on high alert, and incited some of their worst propensities toward parsimoniousness with the truth. On October 10, when the Alaska legislature issued a report on Troopergate stating that Palin had abused her powers but not broken the law, Palin proclaimed to reporters that she'd been cleared of all wrongdoing. When her staff told her she would have to walk back her statement because it wasn't true, she said, "Well, why was I told otherwise?"-neglecting the fact that her talking points had made the results of the report quite plain.

A few days later, Palin got into a fight with Schmidt when she insisted that the campaign put out a statement denying Todd's involvement in the Alaskan Independence Party. Palin contended that Todd had mistakenly registered with the party and rectified the error; she also claimed the party had nothing to do with secession. Schmidt curtly informed her that secession was the party's reason for existence and that, according to the campaign's records, Todd had been a member for seven years.

For Schmidt and Davis, Palin was a time sink the size of the Lake Eyre Basin. She pestered them with complaints that her schedules were so tight that she didn't have time to get in a daily run. She never took no for answer; she just kept asking different senior staffers until she found someone who told her what she wanted to hear. Every media opportunity put before her produced a conniption.

In mid-October, Palin was considering an offer to do a guest spot on Sat.u.r.day Aight Live. Sat.u.r.day Aight Live. Schmidt was in favor, saying it would show the country that she could laugh at herself. After watching some clips, Palin was chary. "I had no idea how gross 'celebrities' could get," she wrote in an email to HQ. "These folks are whack." Schmidt was in favor, saying it would show the country that she could laugh at herself. After watching some clips, Palin was chary. "I had no idea how gross 'celebrities' could get," she wrote in an email to HQ. "These folks are whack."

Palin eventually came around and did the program on October 18. The moment that everyone was waiting for was fleeting. She and Tina Fey crossed paths briefly on-screen but spoke not a word to each other. Even so, the charge from it was electric, and rightly so.

For all the emphasis McCainworld had placed on Palin's big three image-making challenges, none of them had done as much to shape public perception of her as Fey-and Couric. Pop culture has always been a part of presidential contests, but never before had there been anything quite like the Fey-Couric double act: two uptown New York ladies working independently but in tandem, one engaged in eviscerating satire, the other in even-handed journalism. The composite portrait they drew of Palin was viral and omnipresent. The sparkle of celebrity made it irresistible, and devastating. Faced with the footage of Reverend Wright, Obama was able to slay the dragon with his words. Faced with Fey-Couric, Palin was powerless. Everything she did or said only fed the beast. By the time she went on SAL, the definitional war over her had ended. She retained the ardor and loyalty of her fans, who continued to turn out for her, root for her, and defend her. But in the eyes of the broader public-and even more so those of the national media and political Establishments-any traces of her image as a maverick reformer had been erased. For them, Palin had been reduced to nothing more than a hick on a high wire.

ROGUE AS SARAH PALIN may have gone that October, she didn't have a monopoly on the practice, even among running mates. The debate aside, Biden had basically been coloring outside the lines since the Democratic convention. With the Palin tornado making so much noise and kicking up so much debris, it just wasn't nearly as noticeable-until, one day, it was.

In an effort to demonstrate his commitment to being a team player, Biden told Obama when he accepted the VP slot, "I'll do anything you want me to do, but there are two things I won't do: I won't wear a funny hat and I won't mess with my brand."

The Biden brand meant a great deal to Joe, almost as much as the Biden name. To him, the brand was about substance, about truth-telling, about making hard choices even if they were politically awkward or painful. Biden thought of it as a Democratic version of the McCain brand-the old McCain brand, that is.

But what Biden quickly discovered was that Obama's policies were awfully thin, not terribly specific, more rhetoric than substance. Right after the convention, at a prep session at his house in Wilmington for an appearance on Meet the Press Meet the Press, Biden listened to a bunch of the Obamans talk him through the Democratic ticket's position on taxes. "That's our policy? That's That's our policy?" he said incredulously. "Well, it's your campaign. I'll say what you want me to say. But after Election Day, all bets are off." our policy?" he said incredulously. "Well, it's your campaign. I'll say what you want me to say. But after Election Day, all bets are off."

Then one day in the middle of September, a disturbing bulletin reached O-Town. Apparently, Biden had been hanging around with the reporters in the back of his new plane, running his mouth about how he was more qualified to be president than Obama. On paper, of course, it was arguably true. But that didn't make it go down any easier with the suits; actually, it struck a nerve. Axelrod was a fan of Joe's, but this made him angry. He and Plouffe had warned Biden about precisely this kind of scenario that August day in Wilmington. Right out of the chute, Joe was breaking the deal they'd made.

A chill set in between Chicago and the Biden plane. Joe and Obama barely spoke by phone, rarely campaigned together. Not only was Biden kept off Obama's nightly campaign conference call, he wasn't even told it existed. (When the idea of having Biden join was put to Plouffe, his response was "Nah.") A different daily call was set up for Joe, with the Davids, so they could keep a tight rein on him.

The frostiness soon began to run in both directions. Biden had an endless stream of complaints about Chicago. He was frustrated with the staff, didn't like the advertising, didn't love how he was being deployed. After his comments about being more qualified than Obama, his access to the press was severely limited, and he didn't like that, either. Are you part of the Chicago team or are you on my team? Biden would ask new staffers dispatched to join his road show. Are you with me or are you with them?

Then the cold war turned icy, when Biden started making public gaffes, some politically maladroit and some just plain goofy. In the span of a few days in late September, he equated paying higher taxes with patriotism; made a comment at odds with Obama's position on clean coal; and offered a historical reference to the 1929 stock market crash in which he said that FDR was then the president (it was Hoover) and went on television (which hadn't yet been invented) to soothe the nation. In an interview with Couric, Biden was asked about an Obama TV ad that knocked McCain for being computer illiterate. "I thought that was terrible," Biden said. "I didn't know we did it and if I had anything to do with it, we would have never done it."

In Chicago, irritation mounted over Biden's indiscipline-not least inside Obama, whose unflappability burst into flames when it came to his running mate. One night during a debate prep session, Obama approached one of his advisers and said grumpily, When are you going to fix this problem with Biden?

Joe's insertion of both feet into his mouth on October 20 took the tensions into a new and nasty place. At a fund-raiser in Seattle, Biden seemed to be showing off for the wealthy donors, trying to impress them with his fa.r.s.eeing vision, his exclusive knowledge. (Also, he wasn't at his sharpest; he was dog-tired and had a cold.) "Mark my words," he told the muckety-mucks. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. . . . Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

On Obama's nightly call, the candidate hit the ceiling. (Axelrod was already up there, needing to be peeled off, having let fly a string of F-bombs when he first found out what Biden had said.) "Golly, man!" Obama said, with more anger in his voice than "gollys" normally carry. He was, in fact, as p.i.s.sed off as most people on the call had ever heard him, more so than he'd been at even the wickedest jabs from Hillary Clinton. "How many times is Biden gonna say something stupid?"