It looks like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann might genuinely be frenemies now.
A day after Ed Rollins, Bachmann's top political adviser, trashed Palin in a radio interview, a top adviser to the former Alaska governor slammed the longtime GOP strategist and called on the Bachmann camp to retract his statements.
"Beltway political strategist Ed Rollins has a long, long track record of taking high profile jobs and promptly sticking his foot in his mouth," Michael Glassner, Palin's chief of staff, said in a statement to Politico's Ben Smith. "To no one's surprise he has done it again, while also fueling a contrived narrative about the presidential race by the mainstream media. One would expect that his woodshed moment is coming and that a retraction will be issued soon."
As The Ticket previously reported, Rollins criticized Palin Tuesday, insisting she's not as qualified to be president as Bachmann and is a joke candidate.
"Sarah has not been serious over the last couple of years," Rollins said. "She got the vice presidential thing handed to her. She didn't go to work in the sense of trying to gain more substance. She gave up her governorship."
Rollins responded to Glassner's statement with a semi-apology, telling ABC his comments had nothing to do with "Michele, Michele's campaign or any of the rest of it." "This was my transition from being an analyst to a political strategist, and I missed a step," he said.
But Rollins declined to take back what he'd said about Palin. "What's the retraction?" Rollins asked. "I say she's serious?"
Rollins' comments fueled the storyline that Palin and Bachmann are on the brink of a political catfight over the 2012 nomination—a dynamic that political observers have been pressing for weeks, in spite of evidence to the contrary. But both sides added fuel to the fire today in a separate piece in Politico in which the Palin and Bachmann camps sniped at each other—mostly via advisers who declined to be named.
"The view in Iowa is that she's unstable," an unnamed Bachmann aide told Politico. "When she resigned her position as governor that whole event seemed odd, and people in Iowa saw that."
Meanwhile, "a Palin associate" told the paper that the ex-governor has expressed "disdain" for Bachmann--even though another top Palin aide denies that.
Glassner's comments are telling, as Palin aides often don't speak publicly without the explicit permission of the former governor herself.
But that's not the only faux controversy dogging Palin. As ABC News's Sheila Marikar reports, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat from Oregon, has launched in an inquiry into whether Palin's recent bus tour used excessive federal resources. He's calling into question the manpower the National Park Service offered to Palin on her tour of federal historic sites along the East Coast.
A Park Service spokesman tells ABC Palin did receive some special treatment—including early access to the Statue of Liberty—but it was no different from how any other "celebrity" would be treated.
"We treated her as any other celebrity that might come in," NPS spokesman David Barna told ABC, adding they'd do the same for "Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie."
(Photo of Palin: Steven Senne/AP)
