Sarah Palin's charming opening debate line for now-Vice President Joe Biden - "Hey, can I call you Joe?" - was scripted after she repeatedly referred to him as "O'Biden" in preparation sessions, former McCain campaign senior adviser Steve Schmidt told "60 Minutes."

Schmidt was interviewed by Anderson Cooper for a segment about "Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime," a book about the 2008 presidential campaign by political reporters Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, to be published Monday.

CBS News said in a release previewing the segment, to be broadcast Sunday at 7 p.m. ET/PT, that Schmidt recalled a reflexive tendency by Palin to refer to Biden as "O'Biden."

"It was multiple people - and I wasn't one of them - who all said at the same time, 'Just say, "Can I call you Joe,"' which she did," Schmidt recalled.

Schmidt said he took over the prepping and simplified it and that she "more than held her own" in the debate. He said he had been warned by a campaign staffer that Palin was doing very poorly in her preparation.

"He told us the debate was going to be a debacle of historic and epic proportions. ... She was not focused ... not engaged," Schmidt told Cooper. "She was not really participating in the prep." Schmidt confronted Palin and, he said, "She said, 'You know, I think that's right.'"

The "Game Change" authors said they interviewed 200 Democrats and Republicans with inside knowledge. Among the revelations:

- Hillary Clinton was so confident she would get the Democratic nomination that she had two top advisers planning her transition for after she won the general election.

- Until only days before the Republican Convention, Sen. John McCain was still thinking Sen. Joe Lieberman would be his running mate, until the "blowback" was so strong, they feared Lieberman would be rejected by the party, forcing the last-minute choice of Palin for the role. Schmidt said he believes the Obama-Biden victory would have been even more lopsided without Palin on the Republican ticket.

- Heilemann, who writes for New York magazine, told Cooper that when the president-elect called her a second time to persuade her to be his secretary of state, after being turned down the first time, Clinton told him there was a problem.

"At that point she says, 'There's one last thing that's a problem, which is my husband," Heilemann said. "'You've seen what this is like; it will be a circus if I take this job.'"

Halperin, a Time magazine correspondent, said: "It's this extraordinary moment. ... Clinton saying something she says to almost no one, admitting her husband is a problem. At the same time Obama comes back and shows vulnerability to her. He says to her, 'Given the economic crisis, given all I have to deal with, I need your help.'"

The CBS News release said Palin had declined to be interviewed for the story, saying she had dealt with many of the allegations in her own book, "Going Rogue."

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