grammatical number - X, along with Y, "were" or "was"?


I was interested in the following sentence which appeared in a brief Tom Daschle's biography in The Washington Post, Politics, (WHO RUNS GOV).



She, along with Mark Childress, were set to be Daschle's deputies at the White House before he stepped down.



Can someone clarify if the fragment "She, along with Mark Childress, were set to" is ungrammatical, as I think it is?


I would reword were with was because I think that the subject of the sentence - obviously, in grammatical terms - is "She", not "She" and "Mark Childress", but I'm not sure on this correction.


More precisely, I'm not so sure that "She, along with Mark Childress" is equivalent to She and Mark Childress with regard to the effects on the grammatical numbers.




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