Sarah: No Surprise

From Tina Brown's new onliner 'The Daily Beast'

A writer for London’s Daily Telegraph interviewed one of the participants in the Juneau junket about the meeting with Palin:

“She’s bright and she’s a blank page. She’s going places and it’s worth going there with her.” Asked if he sees her as a “project,” the former official said: “Your word, not mine, but I wouldn’t disagree with the sentiment.”

A key organizer and participant in the Palin meeting was Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, who can fairly lay claim to having “discovered” Palin for Washington political circles. Palin’s name appeared in fifty-seven Weekly Standard articles since the Juneau meeting—starting with a paean entitled “The Most Popular Governor” that ran right after the reception.

Indeed, Kristol, who was a loyal McCain supporter in 2000 and is often thought to have suffered exclusion from Bush’s inner circle as a result, may have played a key role in McCain’s decision to tap Palin as his running mate. A McCain campaign insider described to me a tight three-way competition between Palin, Joe Lieberman, and Mitt Romney in the final days. McCain himself, it was no secret, wanted Lieberman to be his running mate, but his senior advisors were adamant that Lieberman could not be sold to the Republican base. A Lieberman nomination might risk exposing serious fissures in the party at the convention in Saint Paul.