It is one of the stranger footnotes in recent political history: the same date, August 29, that once launched Sarah Palin onto the national stage also became, a decade later, the day she was told to stay away from her former running mate’s funeral services.
Writing this week in American Thinker, columnist M. Walter marks the 18th anniversary of John McCain’s 2008 decision to introduce Palin as his vice-presidential pick. But the column is less a celebration than a bitter reckoning with how the relationship soured — and how, in Walter’s telling, the McCains treated Palin with a cruelty that overshadowed her loyalty.
A Decade of Distance
On August 29, 2018, news broke that Cindy McCain, through intermediaries, had asked Palin to stay away from all of John McCain’s memorial services. The request, Walter argues, was especially galling given that the senator held at least five official memorial ceremonies over five days, plus carefully orchestrated arrival and departure events. In effect, Walter writes, the single request amounted to at least five snubs.
McCain’s funeral tour, Walter says, was a “rolling rally” befitting a president — an over-the-top spectacle for a senator, aided by what the columnist calls the “Democrat Media Complex,” with cameras capturing every tear and every ally. But beneath the pageantry, Walter asserts, was a “small, petty, mean man.”
The columnist points to McCain’s 2018 memoir, published as he was dying, in which he said he regretted choosing Palin and wished he had picked his friend, former Democratic senator Joe Lieberman. Walter calls that a “cruel” act of cold forethought, especially after the years of “white-hot, unrelenting hazing” Palin endured from the press and political opponents.
Why Palin Mattered
Walter is candid about his own 2008 vote: he pulled the lever for the McCain-Palin ticket because of Palin, not McCain. “McCain’s only value to me was that he wasn’t Obama,” he writes. “He could have been a houseplant, and I’d have voted for him.” What Palin brought, Walter argues, was desperately needed energy to a campaign that had gone moribund.
That energy, Walter suggests, was the one genuinely good decision McCain’s campaign made — and yet, at the end of his life, McCain chose to disparage it. The snub from Cindy McCain, Walter writes, was the “cherry on top” of a display of disrespect toward a woman who had been “nothing but gracious” to them.
Not every observer shares Walter’s harsh view of McCain, a man celebrated across the political aisle for his independence and his willingness to buck his own party. But the columnist’s frustration reflects a lasting grievance among some conservatives who felt Palin was mistreated by the McCain camp and by a media establishment that never took her seriously.
The anniversary arrives at a moment when Palin remains a polarizing figure in Republican politics, and McCain’s legacy is still being debated. For Walter, the lesson is personal: the memory of how Palin was treated on that same August day — first lifted up, then shut out — is not a footnote but a defining image of political ingratitude.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/08/john-mccain-and-sarah-palin-s-long-strange-trip/