--- title: <i>Game Change</i>: The Two Sarah Palins | TIME description: The new book <i>Game Change</i>has several revelations about Sarah Palin during the 2008 election campaign. TIME managing editor Richard Stengel talks with authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann canonical: https://time.com/video/wR31MiMO/ og:title: <i>Game Change</i>: The Two Sarah Palins og:description: The new book <i>Game Change</i>has several revelations about Sarah Palin during the 2008 election campaign. TIME managing editor Richard Stengel talks with authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann og:url: https://time.com/video/wR31MiMO/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/wR31MiMO/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: <i>Game Change</i>: The Two Sarah Palins twitter:description: The new book <i>Game Change</i>has several revelations about Sarah Palin during the 2008 election campaign. TIME managing editor Richard Stengel talks with authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/wR31MiMO/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # _Game Change_: The Two Sarah Palins > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Subscription: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME is a general-interest news organization founded in 1923, reporting on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world. A TIME subscription provides full access to that journalism in print and digital, from $20 a year, and can be cancelled at any time. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Game Change: The Two Sarah Palins [Watch (HLS stream): Game Change: The Two Sarah Palins](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/wR31MiMO.m3u8) (6:39)  _Published 2010-01-14. The new book Game Changehas several revelations about Sarah Palin during the 2008 election campaign. TIME managing editor Richard Stengel talks with authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann_ --- Jul 27, 2023 1:18 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Sarah Palin and Her Iowa Fans](/video/RvGUPX5i/) ### Sarah Palin and Her Iowa Fans [Mark Halperin on Sarah Palin and the Mama Grizzlies](/video/9HjsILly/) ### Mark Halperin on Sarah Palin and the Mama Grizzlies [Leaders and Revolutionaries: Sarah Palin](/video/LxpaFdKT/) ### Leaders and Revolutionaries: Sarah Palin --- ## Transcript >> Let's talk about somebody else in the book who may or may not be considering running for president, and that's Sarah Palin. The reporting of you guys have about what she did during the debate prep and during debating process is really incredibly detailed and colorful and amazing. Has she responded to the things in the book that you've said about her? Do you think that what she's doing lately, i. e. signing up with Fox News is something that will enhance the prospect of her running for President or detract from it? >> Well, as people trying to sell books, we have great appreciate for the tax she took into spying our book, which is-- she had our spokesperson say, " People should buy my book and they'll get the true story of what happened ." She also said that we weren't there at her debate and prep in Philadelphia. >> I think that these reporters who were not in any part of what I was doing there as a VP candidate, I think that, I spend a lot of this ingoing rouge in my-- >> The issue is-- >> I was there and they were not there. >> Suggesting that only reporters can only write accurately about events if they actually witnessed them directly rather than doing interviews. So-- >> But it is true. We were not there. >> We weren't there. We think-- >> I'd just like to be clear. >> You know, I think that the two biggest things we say about Sarah Palin and this portrait of her on the national, take it for just 60 days about where she became one of the most famous people in the world. >> This is absolutely overwhelming. This is a-- >> One is, the lack of rigor with which John McCain went about the process of taking her. We write in, in greater detail and it's been written about just how slipshod that process was. He was picking a virtual stranger and the vetting background check that was done of her was [ unk ] we say in the book and someone we're going to be the Assistance Secretary of Agriculture. They would get significantly more scrutiny than Sarah Palin was given to beat the potential vice president. The other big thing is her mental state particularly around the time of the debate, on the eve of the debate when she was going to go to Philadelphia for an extended period debate camp and advisers around her saw much different side of her than she had been displaying in public and mostly in private what they called the two Sarahs. >> I told the Congress thanks but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere. >> The other Sarah, not the public and brilliant one with great command of the stage was someone who was described as being a blue funk, almost catatonic at times non- responsive to questions. Imagine you're an aid to a vice presidential candidate and you ask her a question in debate prep or on the plane and she simply doesn't answer. She looks blank and puts her head down and doesn't answer. It's a strange situation that they found themselves in. She also was not eating. She lost her extraordinary amount of weight, which is visibly public and about which campaign got some media inquiries. She wasn't drinking even water. She would drink a little bit of diet soda every day and she was e- mailing round the clock. They would leave her in her hotel suite with her index cards-- she has piles of index card stacks and stacks trying to prepare cramp for the debate. They leave her in her bed with these surrounded by these index cards. They go to sleep and when they'd wake up, they would see e- mails from her all through the night suggesting that she was really working herself hard to prepare and [ unk ] she was-- she wanted to do a good job for John McCain at the same time they became alarmed. They believed that her mental state was such and it raised real questions about whether she could prepare for the debate and down the road, some of this behavior continued and they saw other behavior that troubled them, a certain controlling desire to Google everyone who came on to the plane or her boss that she would appeared with, an obsession on her part and a part of her husband about what was going on, on Alaska politically even though that obviously wouldn't impact the presidential campaign. >> Don't you think we made the right choice for the next Vice President in the United States? >> They became concerned not only that she was troubled, that she might be incapable of serving as Vice President and had John McCain [ unk ] stronger position and potentially win, people on the McCain campaign told us they would have felt compelled to go to him and say, " You need to plan your White House in a way that takes into account the limits of Sarah Palin. She could not be in there with you as Vice President along the lines of an Al Gore or Dick Cheney. >> You know, I think that whether she-- whatever happens with her at Fox and, I mean, who's obviously gonna-- she's gonna be an analyst. It'll be interesting to hear what that means but, you know, she's going to-- again, she could have a lot of people watching her standing up in big public stage for herself. But I think, you know, in the end, whether she-- whatever she handles our book, the truths that are contained in the book are I think hugely prohibited to her future as person. Now she might-- 'cause some of those things where a media bold but, you know, the degree of her substantive deficiency in addition to the things that Mark talked about and in terms of her mental state. You know, the fact that she didn't know why there was a North Korea and the South Korea. The fact that she couldn't explain what the Federal Reserve did. The fact that she thought that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9 / 11. The fact that on the day before her son was about to shipped off to Iraq, she couldn't give a coherent explanation for who America was fighting in Iraq. Those are problems obviously. But deeper than that was the fact that, you know, the assumption that the McCain people have when they put her on the ticket was that she had a mean-- she was like the average governor. And what the meant, apart from everything else is that she could have-- she could give a coherent SA style high school level AP history class explanation of how, trace from the Civil Rights Acts to Barack Obama and how the history of American racial relations, trace how or what the post- Vietnam syndrome is meant for American Foreign Policy and that she could answer that question at the level of a freshman in college or a smart senior in high school. She didn't have anything like a grasp of basic American history and how to make those kinda tie those things together and to tell a story and, you know, without the ability to do those kinds of things, I don't mean to say that she's stupid but her lack of grasp of some of that basic historical material and the ability to synthesize it in a relatively sophisticated level. That's just the problem for a serious national politician. She might be able to remediate it but at the moment, the picture that we have in her eyes of 2008, which I don't think has changed much in the course of the last year is pretty-- proposed a pretty daunting challenges to what she would have to do to be the leader of her party and a potential President of the United States. >> Well, thank you guys. The book is Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. It's a fantastic look at the 2008 campaign that will change your perceptions about it and get it today. Thank you gentlemen. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Rick. >> Yeah. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"\u003ci\u003eGame Change\u003c/i\u003e: The Two Sarah Palins","description":"The new book \u003ci\u003eGame Change\u003c/i\u003ehas several revelations about Sarah Palin during the 2008 election campaign. TIME managing editor Richard Stengel talks with authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/wR31MiMO/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2010-01-14T00:50:22.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/wR31MiMO.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/wR31MiMO/","duration":"PT6M39S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/wR31MiMO/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```