Meghan McCain roasts Nicolle Wallace, Katie Couric over Sarah Palin treatment
Meghan McCain discusses why MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace and other top campaign aides on he father's presidential campaign weren't invited to his funeral.
Meghan McCain said Tuesday on "Hannity" that her father's aides like MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace treated Sarah Palin "horribly" and set her up for "failure" during his 2008 presidential campaign.
McCain, who is promoting her new Audible book "Bad Republican," also took a shot at journalist Katie Couric, who conducted Palin's widely panned interview when she was John McCain's Republican running mate, and recently admitted she sought to "protect" Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg from potentially damaging remarks in a 2016 interview.
Asked by host Sean Hannity about McCain aides like Wallace and Steve Schmidt – who have since become left-wing media darlings – not being invited to her father's funeral in 2018, McCain remarked she saw the treatment of the then-Alaska Governor in a new light.
Seen as a surprise to many, John McCain selected then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his presidential running mate. (Reuters/Joshua Lott)
"I have a whole new lens of viewing how Sarah Palin was treated and how the people working for my father’s campaign really, you know, in my opinion, treated her really horribly, set her up for failure," McCain said.
"I think when you’re seeing Katie Couric talking about how Ruth Bader Ginsburg is someone she helped look good, I thought, well obviously … and I thought that obviously she probably put Sarah Palin in a position to look bad. And by the way, Nicolle Wallace was the person who facilitated that interview, who now has a show on MSNBC."
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McCain remarked that she'd grown more conservative as she'd gotten older.
"I just really hope that the culture has some redemption for Sarah Palin in the same way that we have for so many other women right now," she said.
Palin was only the second woman ever nominated for the vice-presidency and initially provided a boost to John McCain's hopes against Barack Obama, but she struggled under the national limelight and a firestorm of media criticism.
Cindy McCain, wife of, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. lays her head on casket during a memorial service at the Arizona Capitol on Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2018, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, Pool)
Wallace and Schmidt have become unabashed supporters of the Democratic Party since their roles in the failed 2008 McCain campaign.
Wallace now hosts MSNBC's "Deadline: White House," perhaps the most hyperpartisan show on the liberal network, and frequently boasted she would vote for Democrats while helping anchor MSNBC's 2020 political coverage. Like Meghan McCain, she is also a former co-host of "The View," although she washed out after only one season.
Schmidt, who was John McCain's chief strategist in 2008, pushed for the running mate selection Palin, then the Alaska governor and unknown on a national platform. Her Couric interview, where she famously struggled to name a specific single news outlet she read, was a turning point in her public perception.
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Schmidt, long a GOP critic, joined the Democratic Party last year after founding the left-wing Lincoln Project PAC, which has been beset by scandal and accusations of financial skulduggery. He often appears on Wallace's MSNBC program.
Schmidt and Wallace also worked with "Game Change" authors John Heilemann and Mark Halperin on their dishy account of the 2008 campaign, making them persona non grata with many in the McCain world for turning on their boss. They were portrayed sympathetically in an HBO movie of the same name about the troubled campaign.
TODAY -- Pictured: Nicolle Wallace on Thursday, September 27, 2018 -- (Photo by: Nathan Congleton/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)
"That cathedral will be filled with people who stabbed McCain in the front. Schmidt and Nicolle and Weaver stabbed him in the back and you can’t find a single McCain loyalist who will say different or feels different," a source told Politico at the time they weren't invited to the funeral.
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Also not invited to Sen. McCain's funeral was longtime aide John Weaver, the disgraced co-founder of the Lincoln Project who exited the organization this year after his online sexual harassment of men came to light.
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