GOP playing the blame game?

PHOENIX - As a top adviser in Sen. John McCain's now-imploded campaign tells the story, it was bad enough that Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska unwittingly scheduled, and then took, a prank telephone call from a Canadian comedian posing as the president of France. Far worse, the adviser said, she failed to inform her ticketmate about her rogue diplomacy.

As a senior adviser in the Palin campaign tells the story, the charge is absurd. The call had been on Palin's schedule for three days and she should not have been faulted if the McCain campaign was too clueless to notice.

Whatever the truth, one thing is certain. Palin, who laughingly told the prankster that she could be president "maybe in eight years," was the catalyst for a civil war between her campaign and McCain's that raged from mid-September up until moments before McCain's concession speech on Tuesday night. By then, Palin was in only infrequent contact with McCain, top advisers said.

"I think it was a difficult relationship," said one top McCain campaign official, who asked to remain anonymous. "McCain talked to her occasionally."

A revealing coda

The tensions and their increasingly public airing provide a revealing coda to the ill-fated McCain-Palin ticket, hinting at the mounting turmoil of a campaign that was described even by many Republicans as negative and badly run.

For her part, Palin on Wednesday said, "There is absolutely no diva in me."

Later, she said, "This has been all positive for me."

As the running mate with a potentially brighter political future, Palin has more at stake going forward than McCain, whose aides now have an interest in blaming outside factors for their loss, making Palin a tempting target. And even as the votes were still being counted, there were new recriminations, with McCain's aides suggesting that a Palin aide -- Randy Scheunemann, who prepared Palin for the debate -- had been leaking damaging information about them.

Finger-pointing at the end of a losing campaign is traditional and to a large degree predictable, as McCain himself acknowledged in July.

"Every book I've read about a campaign is that the one that won, it was a perfect and beautifully run campaign," McCain said. "And always the one that lost, 'Oh, completely screwed up, too much infighting, bad people, et cetera.' So if I win, I believe that historians will say, 'Way to go, he fine-tuned that campaign,' and ... if I lose, people will say, 'That campaign, always in disarray.' "

The disputes within the campaign centered in large part on the Republican National Committee's $150,000 wardrobe for Palin and her family, but also on what McCain advisers considered Palin's lack of preparation for her interview with Katie Couric of CBS News and her refusal to take advice from McCain's campaign.

But behind those episodes may be a greater subtext: anger within the McCain camp that Palin harbored political ambitions beyond 2008.

'Maybe in eight years'

As late as Tuesday night, a McCain adviser said, Palin was pushing to deliver her own speech just before McCain's concession speech, even though vice presidential nominees do not traditionally speak on election night. But Palin met with McCain with text in hand.

On Wednesday, two top McCain campaign advisers said that the clothing purchases for Palin and her family were a particular source of outrage for them. As they portrayed it, Palin had been advised by Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain aide, that she should buy three new suits for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul and three suits for the fall campaign. The budget for the clothes was anticipated to be about $25,000, the officials said.

Instead, bills came in to the Republican National Committee for about $150,000, including charges of $75,062 at Neiman Marcus and $49,425 at Saks Fifth Avenue. The bills included clothing for Palin's family as well as purchases of shoes, luggage and jewelry, the advisers said.

The advisers described the McCain campaign as incredulous about the shopping spree and said that Republican National Committee lawyers would likely go to Alaska to conduct an inventory and try to account for what was spent.

Palin has defended her wardrobe as the idea of the Republican National Committee and said that she would give it back.

The McCain camp was further upset about Palin's interview with Couric, which aired at a time when Palin was trying to establish some foreign policy credentials.

One of the last straws for the McCain advisers came just days before the election, when news broke that Palin had taken a call made by Marc-Antoine Audette, who is notorious for prank calls to celebrities.

Palin appeared to believe that she was talking to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, even though the prankster had a flamboyant accent and spoke in a more personal way than would be protocol. At one point, he told Palin that she would make a good president someday.

"Maybe in eight years," she replied.