CANDICE: Well, it’s very hard not to have had the show during this because it just is such a feast. Murphy was thrown out of the White House by the Clintons on a number of occasions, but I think Murphy would have reconciled with Hillary, who she might have overlapped with at Wellesley, and would have supported Hillary until Hillary dropped out, and then just thrown everything behind Obama – which is sort of what I did.

LIZ: But, Murphy was a correspondent. Would they have thrown her off of the network?

CANDICE: Oh, well, she would have had to have done it, subversively, of course.

LIZ: Yes, she would have been chomping at the bit all the time.

CYNTHIA: I think she would have had an interview with Sarah Palin. What do you think?

CANDICE: Oh, God, that would have been fantastic.

CYNTHIA: Wouldn’t you have loved that?

LIZ: Well, I know that Candy doesn’t wish to die young, so there’s no way Murphy could come back. But, God, it would be great if Murphy could come back.

CANDICE: As long as Sarah Palin remained peak entertainment and wasn’t elected, what a galvanizing moment.

LIZ: Well, I think she’ll become a really interesting, polarizing point because she presents the Republican party with a real dilemma. Are they going her way or are they going to ever go back to being the "establishment conservatives" they were once — the elite, the rich, the privileged.

CYNTHIA: Well, I can tell you, on that lawn in Phoenix on election night, people were furious that Sarah Palin didn’t speak. They wanted to hear from Sarah. She definitely had spoken to a deep segment of the Republican party and it’ll be interesting to see what happens next. 

LIZ: What was the reason she didn’t speak?

CYNTHIA: Oh, it was complicated. You know, Joe Biden didn’t speak either. But there was something going on and I can tell you only what happened. We first got notification that she was going out – presumably to speak, prior to John McCain taking the podium. But we all went out to be in position. About 15 minutes after that we got an e-mail from her press secretary saying that she was not going to speak and might not even be on the podium, or on the stage. Now, the speculation has been — I don’t know that this is true or not true — the speculation was that she was in fact prepared to speak, and that she was told by the McCain people that she would not be speaking, and wasn’t too happy about that. Clearly there was trouble in paradise. It’s not McCain and Palin themselves. Their staffs had it with each other by that point. We’ve seen some of that in the press in the last few days.

LIZ: Well, ladies, we haven’t heard the end of her yet. A lot of people delight in her and she drives a lot of other people crazy. So you see, we aren’t done yet. If she stays in the Republican party in a very large manner, it sure won’t be the party of William Buckley anymore, will it? I mean, it’ll be a party not of devout intellectuals but only of evangelicals and really right-wing people. And I hate to say this, a lot of people that don’t think very straight, in my humble opinion. So it’ll either kill the Republican party or the party could persevere because of Sarah Palin. That would be very bad, in my opinion.