Sarah Palin’s charming opening debate line for now-Vice President Joe Biden — “Hey, can I call you Joe?” — was scripted after she repeatedly referred to him as “O’Biden” in preparation sessions, former McCain campaign senior adviser Steve Schmidt told “60 Minutes.”
Schmidt was interviewed by Anderson Cooper for a segment about “Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime,” a book about the 2008 presidential campaign by political reporters Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, to be published Monday.
CBS News said in a release previewing the segment, to be broadcast Sunday at 7 p.m. ET/PT, that Schmidt recalled a reflexive tendency by Palin to refer to Biden as “O’Biden.”
“It was multiple people — and I wasn’t one of them — who all said at the same time, ‘Just say, “Can I call you Joe,”’ which she did,” Schmidt recalled.
She’s a phony. I would like to add that not everyone found it charming. I thought it disrespectful. So she’s disrespectful and fake.