The wizards of smart at Newsweek took an image from a shoot of Palin that originally appeared in Runner's World magazine for the cover and splashed the headlines, "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Sarah?" and "She's Bad News for the GOP - and For Everybody Else, Too."
Mike Allen of Politico previewed the cover in the Nov. 14 edition of his "Playbook." In it, he included these comments from Newsweek editor John Meacham who blamed Palin for Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., struggles with his conservative base in South Carolina. One of those struggles for Graham was his acknowledgment that climate change is a manmade phenomenon in need of a so-called "compromise," And that backlash is somehow former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's fault:
"What Obama advisers privately refer to as ‘Palinism' has created a climate of ideological purity inside the GOP. To deviate from the anti-Obama line at all -- that is, to acknowledge that politics is the art of compromise -- risks the censure of the party. Pure ideologues will argue that this is a good thing; others like, say, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close friend of Palin's onetime champion John McCain, think differently. Graham was denounced last week by the Charleston County Republican Party for working with Democrats on issues such as climate change; the senator's office replied by invoking President Reagan's belief that ‘elected officials need to find common ground and work together to solve difficult problems.'"
Meacham went on to fret over Palin as a far-right figure and how her popularity has created an environment where "centrist" political figures in the GOP aren't willing to work with the Obama administration "for fear of a backlash from the base."
Left-of-center sensationalism isn't unprecedented for Newsweek magazine covers. Earlier this year, the brain trust at Newsweek declared us all socialists on their Feb. 16 magazine cover. And as Tim Graham, the director of media analysis at the Media Research Center, said then, "the only Newsweek cover that would be more obviously untrue would be ‘We Are All Objective Journalists Now.'"
