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On Oprah, a contradiction
By BEN SMITH
From the authors of a new Palin bio:
In a segment of her interview with Oprah Winfrey, which was posted online but did not air on television, Sarah Palin was asked whether her family had voted on her decision to accept John McCain's offer to join him on the Republican ticket in August of 2008.
"This time, there wasn't a family vote," Palin told Winfrey. "Other steps in my political life, I've polled the kids, and I have abided by some of the results of the polls that the kids have partaken in. This time, no."
But in September of 2008, Palin told an entirely different story to Fox News' Sean Hannity.
"What was your family's reaction?" Hannity asked. "Was there time to huddle and have a hockey team meeting?"
"It was a time of asking the girls to vote on it, anyway," Palin told Hannity. "And they voted unanimously, yes. Didn't bother asking my son because, you know, he's going to be off doing his thing anyway, so he wouldn't be so impacted by, at least, the campaign period here."
"So asked the girls what they thought and they're like, absolutely. Let's do this, mom."
In our book, "Sarah From Alaska," we reveal that Palin actually instructed the McCain campaign's chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, to tell her children that she was running for vice president, which Schmidt subsequently did.
ABC does some more Palin parsing, seeing hints of a 2012 run on page 381 of her new book.