Charting the psychology of evil, decades after 'shock' experiment

(CNN) -- If someone told you to press a button to deliver a 450-volt electrical shock to an innocent person in the next room, would you do it?

Stanley Milgram began conducting his famous psychology experiments in 1961.

Common sense may say no, but decades of research suggests otherwise.
In the early 1960s, a young psychologist at Yale began what became one of the most widely recognized experiments in his field. In the first series, he found that about two-thirds of subjects were willing to inflict what they believed were increasingly painful shocks on an innocent person when the experimenter told them to do so, even when the victim screamed and pleaded.
The legacy of Milgram, who died 24 years ago on December 20, reaches far beyond that initial round of experiments. Researchers have been working on the questions he posed for decades, and have not settled on a brighter vision of human obedience.

A new study to be published in the January issue of American Psychologist confirmed these results in an experiment that mimics many of Milgram's original conditions. This and other studies have corroborated the startling conclusion that the majority of people, when placed in certain kinds of situations, will follow orders, even if those orders entail harming another person.
"It's situations that make ordinary people into evil monsters, and it's situations that make ordinary people into heroes," said Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University and author of "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil."
How Milgram's experiments worked.

Milgram, who also came up with the theory behind "six degrees of separation" -- the idea that everyone is connected to everyone else through a small number of acquaintances -- set out to figure out why people would turn against their own neighbors in circumstances such as Nazi-occupied Europe. Referring to Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, Milgram wrote in 1974, "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"

His experiment in its standard form included a fake shock machine, a "teacher," a "learner" and an experimenter in a laboratory setting. The participant was told that he or she had to teach the student to memorize a pair of words, and the punishment for a wrong answer was a shock from the machine.

The teacher sat in front of the shock machine, which had 30 levers, each corresponding to an additional 15 volts. With each mistake the student made, the teacher had to pull the next lever to deliver a more painful punishment.

While the machine didn't generate shocks and a recorded voice track simulated painful reactions, the teacher was led to believe that he or she was shocking a student, who screamed and asked to leave at higher voltages, and eventually fell silent.

If the teacher questioned continuing as instructed, the experimenter simply said, "The experiment requires that you go on," said Thomas Blass, author of the biography "The Man Who Shocked The World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram" and the Web site StanleyMilgram.com.

About 65 percent of participants pulled levers corresponding to the maximum voltage -- 450 volts -- in spite of the screams of agony from the learner.

"What the experiment shows is that the person whose authority I consider to be legitimate, that he has a right to tell me what to do and therefore I have obligation to follow his orders, that person could make me, make most people, act contrary to their conscience," Blass said.

An update:
Because of revised ethical standards for human subject research, this kind of experiment cannot be replicated exactly. But Jerry Burger, professor of psychology at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California, made some tweaks to see if Milgram's results hold up today. Watch an audio slide show for more on these experiments »

His study's design imitated Milgram's, even using the same scripts for the experimenter and suffering learner, but the key difference was that this experiment stopped at 150 volts -- when the learner starts asking to leave. In Milgram's experiment, 79 percent of participants who got to that point went all the way to the maximum shock, he said.

To eliminate bias from the fame of Milgram's experiment, Burger ruled out anyone who had taken two or more college-level psychology classes, and anyone who expressed familiarity with it in the debriefing. The "teachers" in this recent experiment, conducted in 2006, also received several reminders that they could quit whenever they wanted, unlike in Milgram's study.
The new results correlate well with Milgram's: 70 percent of the 40 participants were willing to continue after 150 volts, compared with 82.5 percent in Milgram's study -- a difference that is not statistically significant, Burger said.

Still, some psychologists quoted in the same issue of American Psychologist questioned how comparable this study is to Milgram's, given the differences in methods.
The idea of blind obedience isn't as important in these studies as the larger message about the power of the situation, Burger said. It's also significant that the participant begins with small voltages that increase in small doses over time.

"It's that gradual incremental nature that, as we know, is a very powerful way to change attitudes and behaviors," he said.

Stanford Prison Experiment
This idea of circumstances driving immoral behavior also came out in the Stanford Prison Experiment, a study done in 1971 that is the subject of a film in preproduction, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Work on the film will resume in 2009 after McQuarrie's "Valkyrie" is released, his spokesperson said.

In this study, designed by Stanford's Zimbardo, two dozen male college students were randomly designated as either prison guards or prisoners, and lived in the basement of the university's psychology building playing these roles in their respective uniforms.

Within three days, participants had extreme stress reactions, Zimbardo said. The guards became abusive to the prisoners -- sexually taunting them, asking them to strip naked and demanding that they clean toilet bowls with their bare hands, Zimbardo said. Five prisoners had to be released before the study was over.

Zimbardo's own role illustrated his point: Because he took on the role of prison administrator, he became so engrossed in the jail system that he didn't stop the experiment as soon as this cruelty began, he said.

"If I were simply the principal experimenter, I would have ended it after the second kid broke down," he said. "We all did bad things in this study, including me, but it's diagnostic of the power situation."

Turning the principle around
But while ordinary people have the potential do to evil, they also have the power to do good. That's the subject of the Everyday Heroism project, a collection of social scientists, including Zimbardo, seeking to understand heroic activity -- an area in which almost no research has been done, he said.

Acts such as learning first aid, leading others to the exit in an emergency and encouraging family members to recycle are some heroic behaviors that Zimbardo seeks to encourage.

"Most heroes are everyday people who do a heroic deed once in their lifetime because they have to be in a situation of evil or danger," he said.

Glenn Beck: Are you a Sept. 12th person?

GLENN: Are you going to be the person that wasfreaking out like all of us were on September 11th, or are you going to be the person that you were on September 12th. If you choose to be the September 12th person, there are things that you can do, and I just want you to ponder these things. We'll send these out in our newsletter today, but here they are as I see them, and I will expand on them in the coming days and I will help you do these things after the new year, but you have to decide whether or not you are going to be a part of the solution or part of the problem.

So the first thing you have to do is become informed on socialism and communism and fascism, and the free market, Americanism. Who are we? Become informed on the Constitution. That is really just mind bleeding, boring stuff, I know. But I will help you do it in the coming months, I will. And I'll try to make it as entertaining as I possibly can, and I'm trying to work on some things that we can send out to you in the newsletter and everything else, and I've got a few ideas that I think will really help you, and it will be homework but isn't our country worth it? Aren't our children worth doing a little homework?

The first thing you could do, please, is get the 5,000 Year Leap. Over my book or anything else, get the 5,000 Year Leap. You can probably find it in the book section of GlennBeck.com, but read that. It is the principle. It is so easy to read. It's the book Ronald Reagan wanted taught in high schools and Ted Kennedy stopped it from happening. That should tell you all you need to know. It is so easy to understand. When you read these principles, your mouth will fall open. You'll read it and you'll be -- the scales will fall off your eyes on who we are. Please, number one thing: Inform yourself about who we are and what the other systems are all about. 5,000 Year Leap is the first part of that. Because it will help you understand American free enterprise. You'll be able to defend it. You'll be able to know what makes it possible for 6% of humanity living under our free economy to produce 1/2 of the Earth's developed wealth every single year. That's staggering! What is it? It's the virtues and the principles that our founders believed in, that took us and pushed us and made us -- allowed us to take a 5,000 year leap from the dark into the sunshine. We should know why collectivism is wrong. We should know why federal supervision is going to hold our standard of living down. It will reduce our productivity, just as it has in every single country where it has ever been tried. We should know why communist leaders of the past considered socialism the high road to communism. We should know the words of the old communist leaders that said "We don't need to fight a war. We can push them into socialism and once we have them into socialism, communism is next." We should see and read the actual words of the early 20th century American Progressives and see the roots.

How many times have you asked yourself, how did this happen to us, how did we get here? Well, I began asking myself that three years ago when I started doing my homework, and I know. And because I know, I know it can be stopped! It's not a mystery! Read Jonah Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism. Those two things.

Then you need to reconnect with God if you haven't already. Even the very elect are going to be deceived. We need to reunite with God and listen to his promptings. We need to be so clear inside that we're just, we turn our lives over to whatever you want. "Just help me, tell me where to stand and I'll stand there. I don't care. It's not about me. I'll do the hard things. You got it. I'll do it." Be George Washington. George Washington didn't want to serve. Serve. Serve. Know that God's plan is always one where you have the choice. That's the whole thing with God. He allows you to make the choice. So if we get our rights from God and we're trying to do things like he would want us to do, we should have a government that allows you to have as much freedom as possible. The American public should be able to choose on their own. Anybody who's trying to limit your choices, that is not the system. Reconnect with the values of God and listen to the promptings of the spirit. Get involved with your church, then stand guard in your own community. The small scale, think small. Don't think big. Think small. Get involved in your school, in your churches. Do not sit down. Do not take a seat in the back of the bus. Sit at the counter. Risk peacefully, risk. Make a commitment over the next couple of weeks that you will be a September 12th, you will stand while everyone else is afraid to because it takes one. I again preface and put in the middle and put at the end peace, peace, peace. If anything is leading you to pick up a gun or grab a bag of fertilizer, you are a problem. That is not the solution.

Sarah Palin Bikini Pictures

Glenn Beck

September 5, 2008 - 14:02 ET

REALLY?

Are you kidding me?

Sarah Palin is not your little Maxim pin-up girl. She’s managing a twelve billion dollar budget while raising five children and running for vice president. There are no pictures here. The other ones you might have seen aren’t real either. Click here for the truth on that: http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/palin.asp
Despite all of her accomplishments---what are people searching for?

From Wired:
Of course, since relatively few of the electorate knew who Palin was before last Friday, it makes sense that the top search term for Palin was simply the vice presidential candidate's name. But the second and third top searches, …were "Vogue Magazine," and "Photos," according to Hitwise… Other popular searches …are "hot photos," "Sarah Palin Bikini Photos," "Sarah Palin Nude," and "Sarah Palin Naked." …searches for Palin blew way past the search terms "Britney Spears," "Paris Hilton," "Michael Phelps," and "Barack Obama," combined. Instead of looking for Sarah Palin in a bikini, in some green screen video, or kissing Madonna on MTV, perhaps you should read one, or more, of these:

Palin Bashing Press Keeps Swinging and Missing
Experience = 132 Days
The Libertarian Case for Palin
Sarah Palin: Snakecharmer

Or watch these:
Sarah Palin's Speech at the RNC with transcript
Glenn Beck interviews Gov Palin
The true story of Gov Palin's family
Megyn Kelly of Fox News exposes the truth of the tabloid rumors

All of that being said…she is hot.

Nine Part Interview With Sarah Palin and Greta Van Sustrand

Exclusive: Gov. Palin Part 1


Exclusive: Gov. Palin Part 2



Exclusive: Gov. Palin Part 3



Exclusive: Gov. Palin Part 4



Exclusive: Gov. Palin Part 5



Exclusive: Gov. Palin Part 6



Exclusive: Gov. Palin Part 7



Exclusive: Gov. Palin Part 8



Exclusive: Gov. Palin Part 9

Palin: 'Time to move forward'

Gov. Sarah Palin talks to CNN's Wolf Blitzer about the state of the country and helping President-elect Barack Obama.

Rasmussen Poll Says Palin For President In 2012

A Rasmussen poll released on November 7 found that 91% of Republicans have a Favorable view of the Alaska governor, 65% of which say they have a Very Favorable view. Only 8% held an Unfavorable view of her. While news was breaking that McCain aides and staffers found many flaws in Sarah Palin and questioned whether or not she should have even been chosen for the vice president's position, 69% of the Republican respondents to the Rasmussen Poll said that she helped the McCain ticket. Only 20% said that the Governor had a negative impact.Such a high favorability among her party suggests that the Lower 48 have not heard the last of Sarah Palin. Consider also that Governor Palin is most Republicans' top choice for president in 2012 (64%), far outpacing the second (former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, 12%) and third (former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, 11%) choices. As for gender support, 66% of male Republicans would like to see Palin as the Republicans presidential candidate in 2012, while 61% of female Republicans would.

Analysts think Jindal is acting like presidential candidate to be

06:30 AM CST on Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Maya Rodriguez / Eyewitness News

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s name is making the rounds on the Sunday political talk shows as a possible Republican candidate for president in 2012 or 2016.
With the publicity and a trip to Iowa coming up later this month, talk is growing that the state’s rising star is also the GOP’s rising star.

“This smacks of a guy who is laying the groundwork to run for president,” said Eyewitness News Political Analyst Clancy DuBos. “That's what you do if you're running for president. If you're just the governor of Louisiana, you don't go to Iowa because you want the corn."

Jindal’s trip to Iowa is to address the Iowa Family Policy Center as keynote speaker for their banquet. Not coincidentally, Iowa is the state with the first caucus of the presidential election cycle.

"Iowa is the first stand, so he has to branch out, make connections among several county chairs, state party leaders and Iowa is the first place to do so," said Brian Brox, a Tulane political science professor.

But it’s more than just a trip to Iowa that’s fueling the speculation. Earlier this year Governor Jindal’s name was mentioned as a possible vice-presidential pick for Senator John McCain and the governor also campaigned and attended fundraisers for Republican candidates outside of Louisiana.

"You build up IOU's around the country from key movers and shakers in the party by helping them raise money, helping them get elected and when it's your turn, they pay you back," explained DuBos.

Brox says that even though 2012 may seem like a long, long time from now, it’s not too early to start planning.

"He can't wait to make the preparations. He has to have everything in place in the next two to two and half years - so that if he makes the call, he's ready to go."
A spokesperson for Governor Jindal reiterated what he has said so often, that he ‘has the job he wants,’ and is hoping to be re-elected.

Matt Lauer Interviews Governor Sarah Palin

An Obama Tilt in Campaign Coverage

By Deborah Howell OMBUDSMAN for the Washington Post, Sunday, November 9, 2008;

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/11/09/ST2008110901017.html

The Post provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts.

My assistant, Jean Hwang, and I have been examining Post coverage since Nov. 11 of last year on issues, voters, fundraising, the candidates' backgrounds and horse-race stories on tactics, strategy and consultants. We also have looked at photos and Page 1 stories since Obama captured the nomination June 4.
The count was lopsided, with 1,295 horse-race stories and 594 issues stories. The Post was deficient in stories that reported more than the two candidates trading jabs; readers needed articles, going back to the primaries, comparing their positions with outside experts' views. There were no broad stories on energy or science policy, and there were few on religion issues.

Bill Hamilton, assistant managing editor for politics, said, "There are a lot of things I wish we'd been able to do in covering this campaign, but we had to make choices about what we felt we were uniquely able to provide our audiences both in Washington and on the Web. I don't at all discount the importance of issues, but we had a larger purpose, to convey and explain a campaign that our own David Broder described as the most exciting he has ever covered, a narrative that unfolded until the very end. I think our staff rose to the occasion."

The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces about McCain, 58, than there were about Obama, 32, and Obama got the editorial board's endorsement. The Post has several conservative columnists, but not all were gung-ho about McCain.
Stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain. Reporters, photographers and editors found the candidacy of Obama, the first African American major-party nominee, more newsworthy and historic. Journalists love the new; McCain, 25 years older than Obama, was already well known and had more scars from his longer career in politics.
The number of Obama stories since Nov. 11 was 946, compared with McCain's 786. Both had hard-fought primary campaigns, but Obama's battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton was longer, and the numbers reflect that.

McCain clinched the GOP nomination on March 4, three months before Obama won his. From June 4 to Election Day, the tally was Obama, 626 stories, and McCain, 584. Obama was on the front page 176 times, McCain, 144 times; 41 stories featured both.
Our survey results are comparable to figures for the national news media from a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. It found that from June 9, when Clinton dropped out of the race, until Nov. 2, 66 percent of the campaign stories were about Obama compared with 53 percent for McCain; some stories featured both. The project also calculated that in that time, 57 percent of the stories were about the horse race and 13 percent were about issues.

Counting from June 4, Obama was in 311 Post photos and McCain in 282. Obama led in most categories. Obama led 133 to 121 in pictures more than three columns wide, 178 to 161 in smaller pictures, and 164 to 133 in color photos. In black and white photos, the nominees were about even, with McCain at 149 and Obama at 147. On Page 1, they were even at 26 each. Post photo and news editors were surprised by my first count on Aug. 3, which showed a much wider disparity, and made a more conscious effort at balance afterward.

Some readers complain that coverage is too poll-driven. They're right, but it's not going to change. The Post's polling was on the mark, and in some cases ahead of the curve, in focusing on independent voters, racial attitudes, low-wage voters, the shift of African Americans' support from Clinton to Obama and the rising importance of economic issues. The Post and its polling partner ABC News include 50 to 60 issues questions in every survey instead of just horse-race questions, so public attitudes were plumbed as well.

The Post had a hard-working team on the campaign. Special praise goes to Dan Balz, the best, most level-headed, incisive political reporter and analyst in newspapers. His stories and "Dan Balz's Take" on washingtonpost.com were fair, penetrating and on the mark. His mentor, David S. Broder, was as sharp as ever. Michael Dobbs, the Fact Checker, also deserves praise for parsing campaign rhetoric for the overblown or just flat wrong. Howard Kurtz's Ad Watch was a sharp reality check.

The Post's biographical pieces, especially the first ones -- McCain by Michael Leahy and Obama by David Maraniss -- were compelling. Maraniss demystified Obama's growing-up years; the piece on his mother and grandparents was a great read. Leahy's first piece on McCain's father and grandfather, both admirals, told me where McCain got his maverick ways as a kid -- right from the two old men.
But Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Post did nothing on Obama's acknowledged drug use as a teenager.

The Post had good coverage of voters, mainly by Krissah Williams Thompson and Kevin Merida. Anne Hull's stories from Florida, Michigan and Liberty University, and Wil Haygood's story from central Montana brought readers into voters' lives. Jose Antonio Vargas's pieces about campaigns and the Internet were standouts.
One gaping hole in coverage involved Joe Biden, Obama's running mate. When Gov. Sarah Palin was nominated for vice president, reporters were booking the next flight to Alaska. Some readers thought The Post went over Palin with a fine-tooth comb and neglected Biden. They are right; it was a serious omission. However, I do not agree with those readers who thought The Post did only hatchet jobs on her. There were several good stories on her, the best on page 1 by Sally Jenkins on how Palin grew up in Alaska.

In early coverage, I wasn't a big fan of the long-running series called "The Gurus" on consultants and important people in the campaigns. The Post has always prided itself on its political coverage, and profiles of the top dogs were probably well read by political junkies. But I thought the series was of no practical use to readers. While there were some interesting pieces in The Frontrunners series, none of them told me anything about where the candidates stood on any issue.

Nine Part Interview With Governor Sarah Palin by Greta Van Sustrand

Exclusive: Gov. Palin Part 1



Exclusive: Gov. Palin Part 2



Exclusive: Gov. Palin Part 3



Exclusive: Gov. Palin Part 4



Exclusive: Gov. Palin Part 5



Exclusive: Gov. Palin Part 6



Exclusive: Gov. Palin Part 7



Exclusive: Gov. Palin Part 8



Exclusive: Gov. Palin Part 9

Sarah Palin fires back at 'jerks'

By Seema Mehta and Maeve Reston 10:57 PM PST, November 7, 2008

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin swung back hard Friday against aides to John McCain who have criticized her foreign policy knowledge and pricey wardrobe purchases, calling them "jerks" who were too cowardly to speak publicly.The former Republican vice presidential nominee told reporters in Anchorage that a recent Fox News report -- which cited unnamed campaign sources as saying she did not know Africa was a continent and could not name the countries involved in the North American Free Trade Agreement -- was false, and that her comments were taken out of context.

"That's cruel. It's mean-spirited. It's immature. It's unprofessional, and those guys are jerks if they came away with it, taking things out of context, and then tried to spread something on national news. It's not fair and not right," Palin told CNN in an interview.Palin's fierce defense was part of a broader push-back Friday by her loyal aides as she resumes her duties as governor and tries to repair some of the damage done in the rough-and-tumble of the campaign. Although Palin has brushed off questions about whether she will run for president in 2012, her supporters are eager to correct what they see as unfair attacks.And McCain himself has privately expressed sadness and displeasure over former staffers' emerging criticism of his running mate, an aide said.

Since the Arizona senator's defeat Tuesday in the presidential election, some of his aides have said that as much as $30,000 in clothing was purchased for Palin after the Republican convention in September. That would be on top of the $150,000 in wardrobe purchases made for the Palins by the Republican National Committee, which were reported in September and October Federal Election Commission filings.The aides -- who spoke on condition of anonymity while discussing the campaign's inner workings -- asserted that some members of Palin's traveling staff charged clothing for the nominee and her family on their personal credit cards and submitted reimbursement requests to the RNC.The campaign has said that at least a third of the $150,000 in purchases -- which included a $75,063 spree at Neiman Marcus and a $49,426 trip to Saks Fifth Avenue -- were returned.In a phone interview Friday, McCain foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann, who prepared Palin for her debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, bristled at the charges that Palin lacked a basic understanding of Africa and NAFTA. He too said that the reports were inaccurate."The real Sarah Palin is not the caricature put out by these dishonest leakers," Scheunemann said. "The reality is she is a tough, capable, knowledgeable and focused politician. . . . Whoever these people are and whatever position they had in the campaign, they certainly never had John McCain's best interests at heart."Scheunemann, whom Palin reportedly came to trust more than other McCain aides, also denied reports that he had been fired from the campaign. The reports said he had been fired before the end of the campaign for talking to reporters about what he viewed as the mishandling of the Alaska governor.Palin's aides also responded Friday to accounts by McCain aides that she sought to give a speech on election night and was overruled shortly before she went onstage at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix.Palin spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton said that someone in the McCain campaign had in fact flown in a speechwriter to craft a laudatory introduction for Palin to deliver. Palin was disappointed when the speech was canceled at the last minute, Stapleton said.The speech focused on McCain's history and "what an incredible president he would have been," Stapleton said."She still has [the speech] because she feels the words are just beautiful and capture why she has been on the trail, dedicated and devoted 70 days next to Sen. McCain," Stapleton said.As for the clothing, Stapleton said, the campaign brought in a New York stylist and gave her a "blank check" to outfit Palin during the convention -- a characterization disputed by McCain aides, who say the stylist was authorized to purchase just six outfits.Palin "had no idea" about the amounts being spent on her clothing, Stapleton said. "She was sequestered in the hotel, and the only time she was allowed to leave was to watch Sen. McCain speak and to give her own speech."When the stylist appeared with bags of garments, Stapleton said, Palin showed displeasure -- and was stunned by the $3,500 price tag for one jacket."She said, 'No, no, no, no, no. I would never wear this at home, I would never wear this outside of home. This is too much, this isn't me,' " Stapleton said.Campaign officials told Palin she should wear the jacket, Stapleton said, and eventually the governor relented. Palin never saw a price tag after that, Stapleton said.Several Palin aides said that the governor may have requested certain clothing items be purchased after the convention, but that she never told staffers to put them on their personal credit cards.Tracey Schmitt, who served as Palin's traveling press secretary, said, "Any purchases that were made by campaign aides have been or will be reimbursed."In response to allegations that as much as $40,000 was spent outfitting the governor's husband, Todd Palin, Stapleton said: "Two people were told to go clean up Todd . . . so he could look the part. They went and purchased . . . two suits. I'm not sure two suits add up to $40,000."Palin had asked that any clothing that did not belong to the family be removed from the campaign plane in Phoenix before she left for Alaska on Wednesday. But it never was, and when the Palins landed in Anchorage, 14 suitcases were brought to their house. Half belonged to Palin and her family. The remainder were full of the purchased clothing, paperwork and other items.Aides were at the Palins' Wasilla home Friday sorting through the luggage, and will return any clothing and accessories that don't belong to them to the RNC, Stapleton said: "All of it is going back."Palin made that clear in her interviews Friday. "The RNC purchased clothes. Those are the RNC's clothes, they're not my clothes; I never forced anybody to buy any," she told CNN. "I never asked for anything more than a Diet Dr Pepper once in a while."

While it's pathetic to level accusations at someone "anonymously", it's equally pathetic to report such allegations as "news". Shame on the media AGAIN for wasting our time with such fodder! Hateful comments by invisible people are the verbal equivalent of launching water balloons from afar....and about as easy to defend one's self from. Garbage reporting such as this is inexcusable.

Commentary: A letter to the losers

Great article!:)

Editor's note: Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist, is a political contributor for CNN. She also is the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee's Voting Rights Institute, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and founder of Brazile & Associates, a Washington-based political consulting firm. Brazile, who was the campaign manager for the Al Gore-Joe Lieberman ticket in 2000, wrote "Cooking With Grease: Stirring the Pots in American Politics," a memoir about her life in politics.


(CNN) -- As someone who knows from experience, I write this open letter to all staff members, volunteers and supporters of candidates who lost last Tuesday.
No matter how much it hurts to lose a campaign, know that this, too, shall pass.
The campaign is finally over, and you are exhausted and ready to transition to your new life or careers.

But before you clean off your desk and throw away everything in the back seat of your car and the apartment you rented during the campaign, take a moment. Shake the hand of someone with whom you worked. E-mail a thank-you note to a person who helped get you through this long political season. In other words, exhale.

Campaigns are not for the fainthearted. They are tough -- mentally, physically and spiritually. Once a campaign ends, an emptiness comes over you. You find yourself struggling to figure out how to become human again. Suddenly, you're going to the grocery store, reading the entire newspaper instead of the clips, and, yes, speaking in complete sentences, not sound bites or barked replies.

I know what it's like to lose a presidential campaign or two or three. No matter how close the results (Gore-Lieberman) or wide the blowout (Walter Mondale-Geraldine Ferraro and Michael Dukakis-Lloyd Bentsen), you're in a state of emotional disrepair and in need of a home-cooked meal.

Acknowledge your success. Think about the nonstop pace that you thrived in but would crush less hardy individuals. You lived for and met multiple deadlines.
You essentially lived with the people you work with and, God bless you, you didn't kill them, though you probably picked up a few bad habits and gained more than a few unwanted pounds.
Now you're sitting at that desk and trying to figure out what to do with everything you've accumulated throughout the quest to reach the city hall, the statehouse, Capitol Hill or the White House.

No matter how hard you try to contain it, you're both angry and sad. Try not to vent and point fingers. It only creates wounds, mostly self-inflicted, and worse, the candidate you believed in and gave your all for doesn't deserve it.

Just thinking back to 2000 still gets me upset. Once the Supreme Court ruled and Al Gore made his concession speech, I remember feeling lost and disillusioned. I was empty inside as if someone had used a vacuum cleaner and sucked out every bit of my passion for politics and public service. I had no idea what to do with my life. Nobody seemed interested in hiring me; the taint from losing closed every door on which I knocked. For a while, I was convinced I would never be accepted again as a political operative. I had no life beyond politics and no idea how to spend my days or evenings. I didn't have a dog back then. I have one now.

It was hard listening to the opposition announce members of the transition team who had just spent months beating us over the head. Worse, it was hard to go back to a house I had not lived in for almost a year. In fact, I have not unpacked some boxes from my life in Tennessee. It's still too painful.

I had no energy to start looking for work. I was obsessed with those chads: hanging, swinging and, my favorite, pregnant. Above all else, I did not want to quit fighting. I was angry over the election and the recount. Soon, I realized the world was going to move on, and I would be stuck in the past. The only people who understood my mood were former colleagues. Grieve. Mourn. Let it out. It's like the death of someone close to you, except there's no funeral to help bring closure, just more election analysis and pundits spewing out what you did wrong.

Be gentle on yourself. It will take you weeks to readjust and for the world to appear normal. Let it be a period of self-reflection and trying to answer the unanswerable "what ifs." But then let it go. In a world of nonstop campaigning, the next season starts now.

Give yourself a gift. Rent videos and catch up on the movies you missed. Don't read the front section of the newspaper -- they are full of the other campaign right now. Pick up a copy of People or US Weekly instead. Turn off cable and switch to the Sci Fi Channel -- snakes and flies are healthier than exit polls and demographic trend lines.

Above all, call your family. Get back in touch with friends who don't do politics for a living. Remember why you made the decision to give up your life in the first place. And remember this -- you're one of the lucky few. You were on a team that made the effort. You fought the good fight. And you had a front-row seat to history.

So forget wearing the loser label. The next team will snatch you up. Or you'll decide to find some other adventure that fulfills your passion. Either way, know your efforts were never in vain.
Congratulations to all the team players, the winners and nonwinners who fought gallantly until the end. Take it from an old-timer who still loves politics: You will rise again to fight the next battle.

So go get yourself some much needed rest and arise in a few weeks renewed with the spirit of making a difference by serving a cause greater than oneself. Your country needs you.

Commentary: What Alaska learned about Palin

By Kaylene JohsonSpecial to CNN
Editor's note: Kaylene Johnson is the author of the Sarah Palin biography "Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska's Politics Upside Down." She has written for the Los Angeles Times, Alaska magazine and other publications.

WASILLA, Alaska (CNN) -- In a year when Alaska celebrates 50 years of statehood, it can be argued that our state finally joined the union August 29, 2008, when Gov. Sarah Palin was nominated by Sen. John McCain as his vice presidential running mate.
Suddenly, everything Alaskan and everything Sarah came under micro-scrutiny as media from all over the world descended on small-town Alaska to find out more about the woman who held the possibility of becoming the most powerful leader in the world.
In the harsh light of that scrutiny, we learned a few things about our governor. And we learned a few things about ourselves. What surprised many Alaskans was the warrior persona that grew up around Palin as she took on the role of partisan pit bull.
Although she campaigned against rabid partisanship in her bid for the governor's office, we learned that when the job calls for it, she is capable and willing to become a hard-liner for her party. Her legacy as governor, however, has been based more on cooperation than confrontation.
Many of her staunchest supporters here were Democrats who appreciated her willingness to reach across the aisle to get the job done. With team spirit and a singular vision, Palin achieved more progress in two years toward the development of a natural gas pipeline than the previous two administrations put together.
She ushered in reform at a time when Alaskan legislators were being convicted of corruption, and she welcomed an investigation that would clear her of wrongdoing in what became known as Troopergate. Once Palin became McCain's VP pick, the investigation became politically charged, and many of the alliances Palin had created across party lines became strained.
From the McCain/Palin perspective, the investigation had become a political witch hunt. Conversely, Democrats accused the McCain/Palin camp of stonewalling. And so it went, with Palin burning some hard-won political capital right up to the day before the election, when the state's personnel board exonerated her.

Her popularity before being launched on the national stage was more than 80 percent; today, her popularity in the state ranges between 64 and 68 percent, figures enviable to most politicians in America. Even so, she will have some political fences to mend on the home front.
People close to Palin told me early in the campaign that the McCain camp's "handling" of Sarah Palin was unfortunate not only to Palin but to the campaign. Putting a muzzle and straitjacket on her and then scripting her so tightly that she came across as foolish was a "colossal blunder," according to one of Palin's closest aides. Her national poll numbers grew increasingly negative.

Even so, Palin drew enormous, enthusiastic crowds throughout the country and energized McCain's flagging candidacy, not a bad debut for a newcomer to the national political stage.
Home-grown supporters were willing to take to the streets in Alaska and across the nation to seek a victory. One group of supporters organized, calling themselves Alaskans for Reform.
One of the organizers, Mary Havens, told me that after their offers to volunteer were rebuffed by the McCain camp, they set up their own shop, conducted rallies and raised $24,000 for the campaign.

Many of these hard-core enthusiasts were the same people who succeeded in their grass-roots, statewide effort to put Palin in office in the first place. Through groups like Alaskans for Reform, we learned that Alaskans don't need anyone's permission to stand up for what they believe.

The people who know Sarah Palin best say that she joined the McCain campaign with a sincere desire to do what was best for America. She hoped that she would succeed in helping John McCain ascend to the presidency.

Instead, she stood by McCain as he made a concession speech congratulating Sen. Barack Obama on winning the White House. The next day, in Palin's more characteristic style, she called on Americans to unite in supporting the new administration as the nation faces the challenges that lie ahead.

As for 2012, if Palin chooses to run for the presidency, she will now know just how intensely personal and ugly a campaign can get. She will have the traction of being a household name. She will have more experience. And perhaps most important, she'll be running for office on her own terms.