Axelrod responds to Palin's speech
Posted: Thursday, September 04, 2008 12:44 PM by Mark Murray
Filed Under:
Sarah Palin
From NBC/NJ's Athena Jones
PITTSBURGH -- Obama chief strategist David Axelrod said that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's speech at the Republican Convention last night was full of distortions and showed she was a typical politician and not the outsider she portrays herself to be.
"We respect her. She's a skilled politician, as she proved last night. She's deft at going on the attack," Axelrod told reporters here before taking off for Harrisburg Thursday morning. "For someone who makes the point that she's not from Washington, she looked very much like she'd fit in very well there when you see how she brings these attacks, they all felt very familiar to Americans who are used to this kind of thing from Washington."
Axelrod argued that "there wasn't one thing that she [Palin] said about Obama or what he's proposing that's true" and talked specifically about the Illinois senator's plans for tax cuts. He said Obama's tax cuts would benefit more people than McCain's proposals.
As has been the case on the stump over the last several weeks, the message during the brief gaggle with reporters on the plane -- in addition to senior strategist Robert Gibbs' appearance on television this morning -- was that McCain and the Republican Party have no ideas to help middle-class and working-class families.
Axelrod hit back against Rudy Giuliani's and Palin's attacks on Obama's work as a community organizer, saying that while rebuilding communities may not mean much for a former New York mayor who gets paid millions of dollars to keep low cost drugs from entering the country while he works "as an agent for Pharma" that everyday people appreciate the kind of work Obama did.
"I think Sen. Obama's taking the whole thing in stride," Axelrod said. "I don't think he expected gingerly treatment for the reasons that I said. I think he understands they don't really have a record to run on and this is what politicians do when they don't have a record to run on."
He also responded to a McCain campaign spokesperson's suggestion on MSNBC's Morning Joe that it doesn't matter whether Palin appears before the press to take questions. "I think anybody's who's running for president or vice president of the United States ought to be willing to answer questions and certainly she should as well," he said. "I don't even think that's a disputable fact. I don't think the American people are gonna tolerate candidates who are unwilling to answer basic questions about their record, about issues, about where they'd lead the country."
