SMRs and AMRs

Friday, January 16, 2009

Palin to be No Show at Obama's Dinner for McCain

MoJo blog

On the night before Barack Obama is sworn in as the nation's 44th President, his inaugural committee will host a series of dinners honoring public servants it deems champions of bipartisanship. To be feted are Vice President-elect Joe Biden, Colin Powell, and John McCain, whom Obama vanquished last November. At the McCain dinner, the GOP senator, who managed to suppress his bipartisan tendencies during the hard-fought 2008 campaign, will be introduced by one of his closest Senate confidants: Senator Lindsey Graham. But McCain's No. 1 booster during the last year will not be among those hailing McCain. Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, his controversial running-mate, will not attend the dinner, Bill McAllister, a Palin spokesman tells Mother Jones.

Can true tribute be paid to McCain without Palin's presence? Picking her for his party's veep nomination was McCain's most decisive and significant action of his campaign. And she spent weeks praising him as an American hero, a man the country desperately needed as president. True, the Palin and McCain camps have bickered with each other since the election about some of the campaign's miscues. But shouldn't she be part of any celebration of McCain?

According to McAllister, Palin will spend next week in her home state preparing for the legislative session, which begins on Tuesday, and for her State of the State address on Thursday.

Was she even invited? "I don't know if she was invited," McCallister says. Don't know? How could that be? It's hard to miss an invitation from a presidential inauguration committee. For its part, Obama's inaugural committee has declined to say whether an invitation was sent to Palin. Repeated phone calls to its press office produced no answer to this simple question.

(More here.)

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