THE SUNDAY TIMES: Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential candidate, has accused members of President Barack Obama’s administration of a dirty tricks campaign to derail her political career.
Palin’s bizarre announcement that she would quit her post as governor of Alaska on July 26 stunned political friends and foes and has been greeted with derision by a growing number of prominent Republicans. Some conservative insiders have accused the charismatic mother-of-five of succumbing to “paranoia”.
Among the many explanations for her abrupt departure – from an alleged desire to be free to pursue the presidency in 2012 to money worries and ethics problems – the theory put forward by her spokeswoman, Meg Stapleton, is that members of Obama’s White House are to blame.
Palin, 45, complained in her resignation speech on July 3 that she was being hounded constantly by “frivolous” ethics complaints. “This [is] political absurdity, the politics of personal destruction,” she said. “Todd [her husband] and I are looking at more than half a million dollars in legal bills to set the record straight.”
Stapleton told Time magazine last week: “A lot of this comes from Washington DC. The trail is pretty direct and obvious to us.”
Palin and her advisers believe the most damaging ethics accusation concerned “Trooper-gate”, when Palin was accused of pursuing a vendetta to get her former brother-in-law, Mike Wooten, sacked as an Alaska state trooper. A month before the 2008 presidential election, in which she was Senator John McCain’s running mate, the Alaska legislative council found Palin guilty of abusing her power after an investigator concluded that “impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda”.
Palin dismissed the finding as a partisan smear, but it furthered the impression that she was not presidential material after running Alaska, the least populous state in the union, as her own personal fiefdom. >>> Sarah Baxter in Washington | Sunday, July 12, 2009
