Just today, for one of the few brief minutes we got to see Sarah Palin in public, John McCain enthusiastically related the story of how she took the former Governor’s plane and sold it on e-bay “and she made a profit on it.” Apparently… not so fast.
One of the compelling anecdotes about Sarah Palin is that she auctioned off the Alaska governor’s jet on eBay after taking office — a swift move made by a reformer hoping to clean up the excesses of her predecessor.
But in fact, the jet did not sell on eBay. It was sold to a businessman from Valdez named Larry Reynolds, who paid $2.1 million for the jet, shy of the original $2.7 million purchase price, according to contemporaneous news reports, including a story in the New York Times.
Dan Spencer, the director of administrative services for Alaska’s Public Safety Department, said that the Republican speaker of the Alaska House, John L. Harris, brokered the deal.
It also appears that Larry Reynolds was a repeat donor to the GOP. Now, let’s get down to business. She ran on a promise to get rid of the plane, and she certainly did. However, with our GOP nominee for president out on the trail today still telling this story, how well did he really know Sarah Palin? And how closely has he checked into the various stories she has told?
UPDATE: Reader SilverTEE e-mails with an at least partially pertinent point.
I hope you have some sort of proof that John McCain already knew the plane was sold privatly (sic)
If I wasn’t clear enough above, fair enough. This is not a story about John McCain. It’s a story about Sarah Palin. If you watch the video (which is now flying across the MSM and will certainly be on the blogs shortly) you will see that McCain is at a campaign stop today, Friday, Sept. 5, 2008, telling this story with Sarah Palin standing behind him smiling and cheering. The story was originally perpetrated by Palin and has swept across the media. I’m more than willing to admit that McCain doesn’t use “The Google” (though he is aware of the Internet) and probably had no idea. The point of this story is that Palin allowed him to tell the story to the cheering crowd without correcting him, knowing that it was a falsehood. Again… not a McCain story – a Palin story.