Sarah Palin said on Thursday that she owes the country a “global apology” because John McCain “should be our president.”
Palin was McCain’s running mate when he ran for president in 2008, and is sometimes blamed as being part of the reason McCain lost to Barack Obama.
Palin told Fox News’s Sean Hannity that she had the thought while watching Obama’s speech Wednesday night on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
“As I watched the speech last night, Sean, the thought going through my mind is, ‘I owe America a global apology,’ because John McCain, through all of this, John McCain should be our president,” she said.
She pointed to a common Republican criticism of Obama: that he should have left a residual force of troops in Iraq instead of withdrawing in 2011.
“He had the advice, today he’s still giving to Barack Obama, and he will not listen to it, about the residual forces that must be left behind in order to secure the peace in Iraq that we had fought so hard for,” she said.
Hannity did not ask about, and Palin did not mention, reports of a brawl involving the Palin family at a party on Saturday.
McCain said in 2012 that he picked her because “we thought that Sarah Palin was the better candidate.”
This year, he joked on NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers” about how Palin looked like comedian Tina Fey, who famously played her in “Saturday Night Live” sketches, and “That’s why I selected her.”
In the Hannity interview, Palin also called for boots on the ground to fight ISIS, and said the U.S. should not rely on Syrian rebels and Iraqi forces.
“Here we are saying it’s going to take boots on the ground to win this thing, and yet we’re not going to send boots on the ground?” she said. “We’re going to contract this thing out when there is no mightier power than the red, white and blue?”