Below The Beltway

Judging from the reports this weekend, it sounds like things aren’t going so well in Camp Maverick.

Ben Smith at The Politico was the first out yesterday with a report that aides to Sarah Palin were starting to talk about rising tensions between supporters of the Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates.

Even as John McCain and Sarah Palin scramble to close the gap in the final days of the 2008 election, stirrings of a Palin insurgency are complicating the campaign’s already-tense internal dynamics.

Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain’s camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain’s decline.

“She’s lost confidence in most of the people on the plane,” said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to “go rogue” in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.

“I think she’d like to go more rogue,” he said.

And, it turns out, it’s “going rogue” that McCain aides are apparently starting to accuse her of:

ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico (CNN) – With 10 days to go until election day, long brewing tension between Sarah Palin and key aides to John McCain has become so intense, it is spilling out into the public.

Several McCain advisers have suggested to CNN they have become increasingly frustrated with what one aide described as Palin “going rogue” recently, while a Palin associate says she is simply trying to “bust free” of what she believes was a mishandled roll-out that damaged her.

McCain sources point to several incidents where Palin has gone off message, and privately wonder if they were deliberate. For example: labeling robo calls “irritating,” even as the campaign was defending the use of them and telling reporters she disagreed with the campaigns controversial decision to pull out of Michigan.

A second McCain source tells CNN she appears to now be looking out for herself more than the McCain campaign.

Which is understandable given the fact that the McCain campaign is sinking faster than the Titanic at the moment.

As Smith points out, Palin’s future will clearly be at stake as the Republican Party struggles to recover from what is shaping up to be a fairly devastating loss on Election Day.

There are several narratives that could play out, at least two of which will be crucial to Palin’s future in national politics. If the conventional wisdom among Republicans becomes the idea that the McCain campaign is responsible for it’s own loss and that it failed to give Palin the support she should have had from the beginning, then Palin may benefit even from being part of a losing ticket. If, however, Republicans come to realize that McCain was the wrong candidate form the beginning and that his choice of Palin as his running mate was fatally flawed, then her future in the GOP outside of Alaska is, effectively, doomed.