Palin Keeps Attacking Obama!

Huffington Post
Sam Stein
November 13, 2008 11:04 AM

Palin Keeps Attacking Obama: "No Present Button":

The presidential campaign is over, but Sarah Palin -- still at the epicenter of media attention -- continues to take digs at Barack Obama.

Speaking at the Republican Governor's Association meeting on Thursday in Miami, the Alaska Governor spoke primarily about the responsibilities of Republican executives in supporting domestic initiatives like tax cuts and budgetary prudence. But then she offered an obvious swipe at the President-elect.

Governors, she said make "tough decisions to best serve the people who hire us. And we are held accountable every day. The buck stops on our desk. We are not just one of many voting yea or nay or present. No. There is no present button in our office, is there? We have to make the tough decisions."

The line about voting "present," of course, is a clear jab at Obama -- lifted from an attack line that the McCain campaign (and the Clinton camp) used repeatedly on the trail. The crowd, it seemed, got the joke.

The dig comes, moreover, after Palin has continued airing concerns about Obama'a associations and readiness to be commander-in-chief in recent interviews.

It's hard to understand just what type of strategy Palin is deploying here. Her popularity rating plummeted as the campaign progressed, in part because of her attacks on Obama, in part because, after the campaign ended, aides to McCain painted her as vapid and out-of-her-league.

As such, she needs to push back against these negative narratives. And so we see her taking all of these national interviews after mostly avoiding press on the trail. But by continuing to take swipes at Obama, Palin seems to be doing little more than reinforcing the image that she is hyper-partisan and bitter over the election outcome.

UPDATE: Reader JMZ points out that in many states legislation can pass without the governor's signature -- the political equivalent of voting present (governors don't have to watch as their vetoes are overturned).

And Arnold Schwarzenegger, what a phony-baloney, two-faced slime-bag, he backpedaled from his campaign-trail joke that Obama has "scrawny little arms":

"Look, I've seen him playing basketball. He's a better basketball player than I am. But I think that no one should take that joke that seriously, because Columbus, Ohio, is the place where they have the world championships in lifting and in body building every year. And so ... you talk about body and legs and skinny and all -- pumping up, and all of those kind of things. So this was not meant to be an insult in any way. It was meant to be to lighten up the place and to make everyone laugh a little bit."