Kristol, Palin and the NYT: a tale of intrigue and punditry

Conservative commentator (Weekly Standard, Fox and the New York Times) William Kristol is said to have been Gov. Palin’s ‘patron’ and is now in the centre of a post-election losers’ firestorm which could see him dumped (there’s even an online poll about who should replace him) from his prestigious NYT columnist role.

It raises questions about major media outlets employing columnists who are also key players in the political processes they are observing.

Kristol’s many critics are no doubt enjoying his current difficulties:

William Kristol, a neocon who, along with Paul Wolfowitz and a gang of what Saul Bellow termed “high I.Q. morons,” helped sell President Bush on the idea that American troops would be welcomed in Iraq like they were in Paris after the D-Day invasion, didn’t stop there but instead went on to strongly lobby McCain for Palin. Oops.

Part of the problem is that in defending Palin, and his role in criticising the McCain camp, he dumped on the NYT calling it ‘untrustworthy’ and ’suspect’:

Appearing once again on The Daily Show, Bill Kristol, Jon Stewart’s favorite whipping boy (”Bill Kristol, aren’t you ever right?”), on Thursday night defended the McCain-Palin ticket, at one point informing the show’s host that he was getting his news from suspect sources. “You’re reading The New York Times too much,” he declared.

“Bill, you WORK for The New York Times!” Stewart pointed out.

Kristol wrote a column on Oct. 13 calling on Mr. McCain to fire his campaign because it was “close to being out-and-out dysfunctional’ and “its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic”.

There are questions about where Kristol got his information about the internal workings of the McCain and Palin camps and the purpose he had in writing about it in the NYT, Andrew Sullivan has little doubt:

it seems clear that Scheuneman was funneling pro-Palin spin to Kristol, who was just spewing it directly, like raw intelligence reports, into the New York Times, using his column – how else does he see journalism? – as a pure means to advance his own interests within the GOP factional battle.

Last Wednesday, the NYT reported rumors that a close friend and contact of Kristol’s, Randy Scheunemann had been sacked, and quoted an anonymous McCain aide as saying Scheunemann was feeding a “constant stream of poison” to Kristol. Scheunemann denies he had been fired. But Scheunemann admitted to CNN that his email had been temporarily disconnected.

According to the NYT article:

Advisers in the McCain campaign, in suggesting that Palin advisers had been leaking damaging information about the McCain campaign to the news media, said they were particularly suspicious of Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s top foreign policy aide who had a central role in preparing Ms. Palin for the vice-presidential debate.

The fact that the NYT named Randy Scheunemann is also seen as a sign that the paper maybe about to cut Kristol loose.

At the centre of all this post-election recriminating is the selection and performance of Palin.

Kristol is believed to have played far more than a media observer’s role in the discovery and selection of Palin:

Kristol can fairly lay claim to having “discovered” Palin for Washington political circles. Palin’s name appeared in 41 Weekly Standard articles … starting with a paean entitled “The Most Popular Governor”.

Rove engaged in heavy lobbying in an effort to get McCain to embrace Romney. Others, of whom Kristol was the most prominent, pushed Sarah Palin—arguing that she was young, popular, vigorous, unknown and had the right connections to the Religious Right bloc which had proven so important to Republican wins in 2000 and 2004.

Kristol now claims that the McCain staffers searching for the source of the damaging leaks about conflict between the McCain and Palin camps in the final weeks of the campaign are ‘paranoid’. Kristol is vigorously proclaiming his loyalty to Senator McCain, as he did in this Fox interview:

This is an imbroglio with a fair distance to go.