The source of the Sarah Palin link comes out

As you know, someone in the McCain campaign last week leaked that Sarah Palin could not name the countries in NAFTA and did not know if South Africa was a continent or a country. I thought it was pretty mean-spirited myself, and it seemed like most of what was said was either really exaggerated or an outright lie.

The leak revealed himself today. It's Martin Eisenstadt, a foreign policy adviser for the McCain campaign. Here's what he had to say:

So yes, to be clear, last week I was the one who leaked those things to a producer at Fox News who works with Cameron. Carl and his producers are good guys, and I don’t want them to have to worry about protecting their sources (and going through the wringer ala Judith Miller or Matt Cooper) on something like this.

As you know, I was one of the foreign policy advisers on the McCain campaign who worked with Randy Scheunemann to help prep Sarah on her debate with Joe Biden. Did we outright give her a geography quiz when we started the prep? No, of course not. But yes, in the context of the prep, it slowly became apparent that her grasp of basic geo-political knowledge had major gaps. Could she have passed a multiple choice test about South Africa or NAFTA.

Probably. But it was clear that she simply didn’t have the ease of knowledge that we come to expect from a major party political candidate. Other slights came up, too: Not knowing the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas. Or the difference between the Shiites and Suni. Or when it came to international terrorist organizations, knowing that the IRA was in Northern Ireland, and ETA in Spain.
The real thing we had to constantly remind her was to never, ever compare herself in any way to Hillary Clinton, as she had at her announcement speech. We had it on good authority that Biden was prepping to unleash the inevitable line, “I know Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is a friend of mine. And Sarah, you’re no Hillary Clinton.” Alas, Biden would have been right.

Well, I guess this confirms what we already know. Sarah Palin was severely underqualified for the VP job. Thank God McCain did not win. I could not imagine being smarter than a president or VP candidate. Oh wait, I forgot about the last 8 years...