McCain staffers push back on Vanity Fair's Palin profile

Washington Times - By Amanda Carpenter on June 30, 2009

Alaskan Governor and GOP 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin may be nice looking, but she sure wasn’t a very good candidate is the bottom line of Vanity Fair’s 9,920-word profile about her released Tuesday.
The comments about her beauty weren't entirely complimentary, either. Vanity Fair writer Todd S. Purdum said her looks probably hurt her as much it helped win voters during the campaign.
The brunt of his article, the notion that she was never suited to run nationally, relied heavily on unattributed quotes from McCain campaign staffers who felt she wasn’t up to snuff and refused to properly study up on policy issues.
The Democratic National Committee quickly seized on the story and said it was the first “nondorsement of 2012.”
Three McCain staffers, however, were immediately willing to go on the record with the Washington Times in their support for Mrs. Palin after the Vanity Fair piece was published online.
Randy Scheunemann, director of foreign policy and national security for the McCain-Palin campaign and who played Joe Biden in Mrs. Palin’s debate prep, was happy to push back against the Vanity Fair piece, saying she was an impressive and capable candidate.He recalled her performance in the vice-presidential debate where she “held her own and went toe-to-toe” against Mr. Biden, a candidate with much more experience in debates and decades of public service. She was “incredibly hard-working and concerned she’d do a good job for John McCain who was a national hero and plucked her from obscurity,” Mr. Scheunemann said. “That weighed on her every day.”“It’s disheartening and dishonorable anyone that who worked for John McCain would participate in this kind of character assassination against his running mate,” Mr. Scheunemann said. ...(continues...)