Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin said Thursday that Sen. John McCain's regret in choosing her as his 2008 running mate was "like a perpetual gut-punch" because he has told her differently over the years.
"That's not what Sen. McCain has told me all these years," Palin, the former Alaska governor, told The Daily Mail.
"He's apologized to me repeatedly for the people who ran his campaign — some who now staff MSNBC, the newsroom there, which tells you a lot.
"It's not a real fun thing that, part of my job is the requirement of having to read the news every day," she said.
McCain, 81, the Arizona Republican who is battling brain cancer treatments, said in an upcoming memoir and HBO documentary that he regretted not instead picking retired Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Democrat who later became an independent, as his 2008 running mate.
Republicans advised McCain against selecting Lieberman because his caucusing with the Democrats would have split the party, he wrote.
"It was sound advice that I could reason for myself," McCain said in the book, "The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciation."
"But my gut told me to ignore it and I wish I had," he wrote.
In the documentary, McCain called the Lieberman decision "another mistake that I made."
The book and film are due out later this month.
Palin to the Daily Mail that McCain might not believe himself that she jeopardized his candidacy but that member of his inner circle could be speaking for him.
"I attribute a lot of what we're hearing and reading regarding McCain's statements to his ghostwriter or ghostwriters," she said.
"I don't know all the details of his condition right now," Palin added. "It happens to me also where people speak for me and a bell is rung, and you can't un-ring the bell.
"I don't know unless I heard it from Sen. McCain myself."
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