She said she meant no disrespect by it, but it’s hard to see how: “So I’m looking around for somebody to pray with, I just need maybe a little help, maybe a little extra… And the McCain campaign, love ‘em, you know, they’re a lot of people around me, but nobody I could find that I wanted to hold hands with and pray.” She ended up praying with Piper. Maybe she meant there was no one there with whom she felt close enough to share a moment like that?
Anyway, I’m sure it’s all their fault for feeling insulted.

“We all talked this A.M.,” said one former Palin aide in an e-mail. “This set off a nerve for sure with a lot of people.”
“It’s yet another example of the few staff still loyal to Palin questioning their loyalty and ardent defense of her over the several months since the campaign,” said the aide, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about campaign colleagues…
“It’s about us people who were on the plane, who showed extreme loyalty to Palin, continually getting thrown under the bus or slapped in the face by her comments, whether she means it or not,” the staffer said, adding that Palin’s remarks “cause you to question not only your loyalty but her judgment as a leader.”
The former aides said they place part of the blame for Palin’s post-campaign candor on the governor’s staff in Alaska. Several have reached out individually to offer advice or assistance to the governor, but “have gotten only pleasantries in response,” said one aide.

Months before Palin was selected as McCain’s running mate, I told anyone who’d listen that she’d be the shrewdest pick. When she addressed the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, I was utterly electrified. But during the latter days of the campaign, I started hearing rumors about how top-level McCain backers were shuttling back-and-forth to Alaska to put out various fires, and of course there has been a steady drumbeat of stories about Palin’s low-level abuse of power. Then there is the fact that the national Republican Party has destroyed much of what was great about Sarah Palin, and she let them do it.

For all its virtues, Alaska has a very quirky political culture, one that doesn’t always translate in the lower 48. At first, this was Palin’s strength. She wasn’t a Southern evangelical, a familiar—some would say overfamiliar—figure in Republican politics. Rather, she was a Northern evangelical, with an accent that almost made her sound like a Minnesotan. Despite her meteoric rise as a foot soldier of Wasilla’s Christian right, she also cut a strangely post-partisan figure in her early days as governor. As she told The New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch long before she was selected as McCain’s running mate, she was actually glad that Barack Obama was polling well in Alaska because it represented a challenge to the status quo. Suffice to say, most rising Republican stars would stick to praising John McCain.

Palin was quirky in another respect: Recognizing that Alaska had to carve out its own path, she broke with Beltway Republicans in supporting a windfall-profits tax on oil companies among other populist measures. But once Palin signed up as McCain’s running mate, she couldn’t talk up the windfall-profits tax, one of her central accomplishments, because the Republicans in Congress bitterly opposed it. Palin also had a gift for communicating policy details in homespun language. Soon after meeting the McCain team, she reportedly pressed for proposals that she could sell to working mothers and small-business owners and other key constituencies. The sad truth is that the McCain platform, a mish-mash that reflected the often-contradictory input of dozens of advisers and donors, didn’t give her much to work with. Sarah Palin thus became red meat for the base—the pitbull with lipstick.

Palin’s campaign antics can be forgiven. What can’t be forgiven is the ham-handed way she’s tried to build her national profile since she returned to Alaska. She’s abandoned the bold right-left populism that won over Alaska voters—and me—in the first place in favor of an increasingly defensive and harsh partisanship. After making her name as a determined enemy of Alaska’s corrupt Republican establishment, she recently called for Democratic Sen. Mark Begich to step down so the hilariously crooked Ted Stevens could get another crack at the seat. She loudly promised to leave federal stimulus money on the table before clawing that promise back with a whimper. One can’t help but get the impression that Palin is a clownish, vindictive amateur.

Now, for example, Palin is raising hackles for naming colorful crackpot Wayne Anthony Ross to be Alaska’s attorney general. It turns out that Palin may have consulted with Ross over a state senate appointment, a move that would have been against state law. As a general matter, state law is something you might want your AG to be on top of.

What I’m wondering is: Has Sarah Palin undergone some kind of secret lobotomy?

I'd like to thank Sarah Palin for her bravery in explaining the importance of a woman's right to choose. Even braver, the Alaska governor made her eloquent case for choice at a right-to-life fundraising dinner.

That was not, of course, Palin's intention in revealing that she momentarily considered having an abortion. Twice, actually -- once when she discovered she would be a mother at 44, again several weeks later when she discovered that her baby would have Down syndrome.

I'll quote Palin at length, partly because I want readers to see that I'm not taking her remarks out of context, even more because the account of her anguished choice about whether to "change the circumstances" is so gripping and so genuine. Instead of the Tina Fey caricature, we see a flesh-and-blood woman whose moral certainties are being put to a real-world test:

"I had found out that I was pregnant while out of state first, at an oil and gas conference. While out of state, there just for a fleeting moment, wow, I knew, nobody knows me here, nobody would ever know. I thought, wow, it is easy, could be easy to think, maybe, of trying to change the circumstances. No one would know. No one would ever know.

"Then when my amniocentesis results came back, showing what they called abnormalities. Oh, dear God, I knew, I had instantly an understanding for that fleeting moment why someone would believe it could seem possible to change those circumstances. Just make it all go away and get some normalcy back in life. Just take care of it. Because at the time only my doctor knew the results, Todd didn't even know. No one would know. But I would know. First, I thought how in the world could we manage a change of this magnitude. I was a very busy governor with four busy kids and a husband with a job hundreds of miles away up on the North Slope oil fields. And, oh, the criticism that I knew was coming. Plus, I was old . . .

"So we went through some things a year ago that now lets me understand a woman's, a girl's temptation to maybe try to make it all go away if she has been influenced by society to believe that she's not strong enough or smart enough or equipped enough or convenienced enough to make the choice to let the child live. I do understand what these women, what these girls go through in that thought process."