roger hollander

As the implosion of the defeated Republican campaign continued yesterday, the landscape of American conservatism was dotted with signs that these were very strange times indeed.

Rush Limbaugh, behemoth of rightwing radio, took to the airwaves to declare war on two enemies: Barack Obama and the Republican party. Bloggers at FreeRepublic.com, an internet hub for conservatives, announced a boycott of Fox News and John McCain’s aides fell over one another to leak embarrassing details about the campaign to the press.

Liberals, indulging in what the writer Andrew Sullivan termed “Palinfreude”, were presented with a smorgasbord, ranging from the tale of how McCain’s pro-Palin foreign policy adviser had his Blackberry confiscated in the closing days of the race, to how the party had paid for Todd Palin’s silk boxer shorts.

The fighting consuming the McCain and Palin camps threatened to derail broader efforts to overhaul the Republican party after Tuesday’s decisive defeat, for which some insiders blamed Sarah Palin. Veterans of the right gathered in the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, on Thursday for a summit on the movement’s future, but even as they did so, the blame went on.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it is worse than I thought,” Limbaugh told listeners. “What the Republican party, led by disgruntled and failed McCain staffers, is trying to do to Sarah Palin, is unconscionable … There are country-club, blue-blood … Republicans who want nothing to do with a firebrand conservative [who] can fire up people.” He added: “We’re going to be taking on two things here [over] the next four years: Obama, and our own party establishment.”

John Fund, a Wall Street Journal columnist, said he had received multiple calls from campaign aides wanting “to use me as a conduit for their complaints”.

“Some on the McCain campaign staff seem more eager than most to settle scores,” he noted.

The main ammunition in the war was a lengthening list of allegations against Palin: that she thought Africa was a country; that she failed to inform the campaign about a scheduled call with Nicolas Sarkozy which turned out to be a prank; that she refused to undergo coaching prior to her disastrous interviews with CBS anchor Katie Couric; that she couldn’t name the three countries in the North America Free Trade Agreement; and that the party had spent up to $70,000 (£45,000) on “wardrobe items” for Palin and “luxury goods” for her husband, in addition to the $150,000 already reported. (Some of the claims were revealed by Fox, hence the boycott.)

The New York Times reported that when Palin met McCain in Phoenix on Tuesday night, she held the text of a speech she planned to deliver, in defiance of campaign convention, and had to be overruled.

The attacks are partly ideological: some blame Palin and her social-conservative supporters for blunting McCain’s appeal to independents, while others believe Palin could be the populist, hawkish figurehead of a revitalised Republican future.

But there is plenty of self-interest at stake. “This blame game is the consultants – the people who make their living running campaigns and don’t want to be blamed, because they need another job,” said Al Regnery, publisher of the American Spectator, and former president of Regnery Publishing, the company behind many recent rightwing bestsellers.

At Thursday’s summit, he said, “there was a lot of discussion about these people, who always seem to come back, whether they win or lose, and get paid a lot of money. We said we thought our side would be much better off without them.”

The sniping at Palin has provoked a backlash. One influential website, RedState.com, announced Operation Leper, designed to blacklist campaign staffers believed to be responsible. “We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them,” it explained.

There was speculation that the culprits may be former aides to Mitt Romney, positioning their hero for a future presidential run.

The collapse of the McCain-Palin alliance began long before election day, Steve Schmidt, a senior McCain adviser, speaking to reporters on the candidate’s plane, was making little effort to hide his disdain for Palin. Asked if her presence on the ticket had been a disadvantage, he twice refused to answer.

Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s foreign policy chief, this week denied reports that he had been fired in the final stage of the campaign for siding with Palin and leaking “poison” on McCain to the pro-Palin columnist William Kristol. But even one of his allies, Michael Goldfarb, told reporters that Scheunemann’s Blackberry had been confiscated in the days before the election.

Kristol, who in one column advised McCain to “fire” his campaign, scoffed at reports that he had advised Palin. “I’m afraid it shows how paranoid some of these McCain aides have gotten – they should take a good rest after a tough campaign,” he told Fox.

He had met Palin once in his life, he continued, and interviewed her once by phone. “You know why this is really disgusting and disgraceful?” he said. “It’s disloyal to John McCain. Who selected Sarah Palin? John McCain. Who defended Sarah Palin for the last three months? John McCain.”

Returning to Alaska, Palin dismissed the criticisms, attributing them to “a small, bitter type of person”. Instead, she has emphasised perhaps the only thing that still unites her and her supporters with McCain loyalists: hostility towards the media.

She had “a little bit of disappointment in my heart about the world of journalism today”, she said, while McCain’s closest aide, Mark Salter, told Politico: “Maybe if the media had been fair, we still would have lost. But there were two different standards of scrutiny for us and Obama.”

Palin offered to help reporters confront their problems. “I want to … help restore some credibility there,” she said.