Sarah Palin and The New-Clear Option

Over at the Politico, Jonathan Martin corrects a previous report by Erick Erickson on RedState.com that claimed Sarah Palin spoke off the cuff last night rather than reading from a teleprompter. Erickson says sources close to McCain told him that the teleprompter malfunctioned during Ms. Palin's speech and consequently forced her to improvise. We can confirm that that's false: like Martin, Media Mob was sitting in the press section and could see plainly that the teleprompter was working just fine.

Funny thing though: both times Ms. Palin was called to say the word "nuclear," ("we're going to lay more pipelines, build more nuclear plants, create jobs with clean coal", "Terrorist states are seeking nuclear weapons without delay") the word was spelled "new-clear" on the screen. Which is interesting, because it suggests someone in the party (maybe Ms. Palin herself) really, really didn't want her to mispronounce this word. Why all of a sudden does the Republican party care about this, after not caring about it-- defiantly, it seemed sometimes!-- for eight years?

In other teleprompter news: it seemed for the last five minutes or so of Giuliani's speech that whoever was running the teleprompter had orders to get him off the stage as soon as possible, because the crawl was moving extremely quickly, and skipped over relatively big chunks of the prepared remarks as it tumbled towards the finish line. Jonathan Martin's Politico post, which says that Giuliani's speech took a lot longer than it was supposed to because he kept going off script, seems to corroborate that theory.