Baked Alaskan

Josh:

The McCain camp has made her signature issue shutting down the Bridge to Nowhere. But as The New Republic put it today that's just "a naked lie." And pretty much the same thing has been written today in Newsweek, the Washington Post, the AP, the Wall Street Journal. Yesterday even Fox's Chris Wallace called out Rick Davis on it

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This was not going to get traction just on the Obama campaign's say-so.  By being patient, letting McCain and Palin repeat an obviously false and frankly unbelievable (no governor turns down earmarks), the Obama campaign has been way better served by having this takedown come from the traditional media, with just a couple of sardonically humorous assists.

What's especially sweet about this is that at this point McCain can't just dump her, the way McGovern dumped Eagleton, because he himself was pushing this nonsense.  To 40 million people, posed in front of Walter Reed Middle School, he uttered these plainly false, and absolutely ridiculous statements. 

Here's the AP factcheck:

Palin did abandon plans to build the nearly $400 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport. But she made her decision after the project had become an embarrassment to the state, after federal dollars for the project were pulled back and diverted to other uses in Alaska, and after she had appeared to support the bridge during her campaign for governor.

McCain and Palin together have told a broader story about the bridge that is misleading. She is portrayed as a crusader for the thrifty use of tax dollars who turned down an offer from Washington to build an expensive bridge of little value to the state.

"I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere," she said in her convention speech last week.

That's not what she told Alaskans when she announced a year ago that she was ordering state transportation officials to ditch the project. Her explanation then was that it would be fruitless to try to persuade Congress to come up with the money.

"It's clear that Congress has little interest in spending any more money on a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island," Palin said then.

Palin indicated during her 2006 campaign for governor that she supported the bridge, but was wishy-washy about it. She told local officials that money appropriated for the bridge "should remain available for a link, an access process as we continue to evaluate the scope and just how best to just get this done."

She vowed to defend Southeast Alaska "when proposals are on the table like the bridge and not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that's so negative" - something that McCain was busy doing at the time, as a fierce critic of the bridge.

Even so, she called the bridge design "grandiose" during her campaign and said something more modest might be appropriate.

Palin's reputation for standing up to entrenched interests in Alaska is genuine. Her self-description as a leader who "championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress" is harder to square with the facts.

The governor has cut back on pork-barrel project requests, but in her two years in office, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation. And as mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million.

So now what is Charlie Gibson going to do?