Composite image by POLITICO Palin hit hard on the Sunday shows

Palin-mania continued to dominate the conversation on the Sunday morning talk shows, as Democrats slammed Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin for distorting her record in ads and on the campaign trail.

The attacks came in the midst of a difficult weekend for John McCain, the Arizona senator and GOP presidential nominee. After a week of putting Democratic rival Barack Obama on the defensive, McCain’s supporters found themselves defending the veracity of claims made by the campaign about the new addition to the ticket.


Several scathing media reports accused the McCain campaign of routinely stretching the truth, particularly when it comes to Palin’s record.

On Saturday, the Obama camp issued a long memo to reporters detailing the how Republicans have “distorted, distracted, and outright lied to the American people.”

Sensing a favorable turn in the news cycle, Democrats hit hard on the Sunday morning shows.

“She doesn’t know anything, and she is not ready to be vice president,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said on CBS’s "Face The Nation."

“Quite honestly, the interview I saw and that Americans saw on Thursday and Friday was similar to when I didn’t read a book in high school and had to read the Cliff’s Notes and phone in my report,” Wasserman-Schultz said of Palin’s interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson last week. “She’s Cliff-noted her performance so far.”

Other surrogates focused on what New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson called “a series of distortions” on CNN’s "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer."

“Here’s the issue with Gov. Palin. She’s a governor. … That’s good executive experience. She’s telegenic. She’s smart. But there are just a lot of distortions about her record that are coming out,” he said.

Richardson, a one-time candidate for president, attacked Palin for attempting to bolster her foreign policy credentials by claiming she traveled to Iraq in 2007. Her visit was actually a brief stop at a border crossing between Iraq and Kuwait.

On CBS, Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson defended Palin by pointing out that the last two presidents were governors who entered the White House lacked significant foreign policy experience.

“So I don’t think the fact that she hasn’t been to the Middle East yet is a factor,” said Hutchinson. “She has shaken up Alaska politics, and she has instincts about reform and ethics that’s very, very strong.”

On "Fox News Sunday," former Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles, a Democrat supporting Obama, and Alaska Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell, a Republican, debated the number of earmarks Palin has requested as governor.

In a Friday interview on ABC's "The View," McCain said Palin had requested no earmarks. His campaign later backed away from the claim.

Palin, in fact, requested $453 million worth of earmarks as governor. In her previous position as mayor of Wasilla, she hired a lobbyist to procure $27 million for the Anchorage exurb.

“If you sit through her Cabinet meeting, she’s driving down the number of earmarks that Alaska is requesting,” said Parnell. “The prior administration asked for 63 earmarks. It’s down to 31 this year. We’re driving those numbers down and working to bring reform to Alaska. This is not something you can just turn the switch on overnight and change.”

Both ABC’s "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" and CBS’s "Face the Nation" hosted female supporters of the candidates who fought over Palin’s record on equal pay for women, abortion rights and early childhood education.

“Women have been voting on our side of the ticket because they pay attention to the policies that matter,” Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), a longtime Obama backer, said on "Face the Nation." “I’ll make a prediction that the women of American will vote for Barack Obama by a healthy margin.”

Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and a McCain supporter, responded that women consider a wider array of issues when casting their vote.

“This is what the Democratic Party has done for years. It has tried to hold women hostage by frightening them on issues such as reproductive rights,” said Fiorina.

Republicans certainly got in a few digs of their own, decrying Obama’s lack of executive experience and record of voting with in line with his party.

“I think what we haven't done adequately in this campaign, meaning Republicans, is maybe some of the emphasis on some of these other issues, it should be on the fact that Senator Obama is the most left-wing candidate the Democratic Party has ever had, the most liberal member of the Senate,” said former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who ran against McCain in the primaries and now supports him.

Giuliani continued the criticism of Obama's record as a community organizer he first made during the Republican National Convention, saying, "Sure, community organizers do good work, and some don't do very good work, just like everybody else. The question is what kind of work did Barack Obama do, and how effective was it long term? A lot of those housing projects failed."

But for all their criticism, Democrats recognized that Palin poses some real challenges for their party.

Even Sen. Charles Schumer, an often-outspoken New York Democrat, told NBC "Meet the Press" guest host Tom Brokaw that the McCain campaign had done a “good job of sort of turning around the battleship at the convention.”

But the campaign’s new tactics, he added, lower the level of debate in the election.

“Look, Barack Obama, to his credit, would like the campaign to just be on the big issues,” said Schumer. “But under Karl Rove's leadership, McCain is doing what Karl Rove does: small bore, nasty, diversionary.”

On "Fox News Sunday," Rove, the former Bush adviser, had a response to Democrats slamming his campaign strategy. “I demand a royalty every time they mention my name,” said Rove. “Maybe 25 cents per mention, a buck per mention.”

Rove, though, made some news of his own when he conceded that McCain, in his attack ads, had "gone one step too far, and [is] sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100 percent truth test.”