Palin's Off the Record

Today, the McCain campaign announced that when Sarah Palin finally begins traveling around America on her own -- after all, she has been attached at the hip to John McCain in order to further shield her from people who actually might want to ask her questions -- everything she says in the presence of reporters will be off the record.

Associated Press reporters were not on the plane, but an aide told the journalists on board that all Palin flights would be off the record unless the media were told otherwise. At least one reporter objected. Two people on the flight said the Palins greeted the media and they chatted about who had been to Alaska, but little else was said.

For those unaware of how big races work, once the presidential campaign begins in earnest, the two candidates on each ticket travel around the country, generally on a private plane, and always with a group of reporters who travel with them to cover their exploits across the trail. While on flights, the candidates will generally casually mingle with the reporters traveling with them, and very often will sit down among them (in coach) and answer questions. Because they all travel together and see each other so much over the campaign, there is certainly a familiarity, and these types of sessions are not very adversarial. There are of course times where a candidate will wish to converse with a media person or persons off the record, and that is naturally not a problem.

Here, it seems like the Palin Protection Brigade, i.e. the advisors on McCain's campaign terrified that Palin will not be able to answer even basic questions on the biggest issues of the day, have added a wrinkle to the process. Not content to not allow Palin to utter a single syllable that has not be pre-written by a team of McCain staffers, Team McCain is building a wall around Palin even on campaign flights.

And who could blame them? After all, what if a reporter exploits a relaxed Palin and actually asks her a question? Clearly, this is a terrifying prospect to Team McCain, thus we have this new layer of protection for the grossly unqualified Alaska pol. God forbid she be on the spot and not be able to have someone whisper in her ear that Hugo Chavez isn't that guy who formed the farm worker's union, or that Robert G. Mugabe wasn't the guy who created the winery in the Napa Valley, or that the country that Russia is currently at war with isn't named after the Peach State.

In all seriousness, this is another pathetic and embarrassing story in what has become a daily drum-beat of news which has completely stripped away any modicum of respectability in the Palin choice, assuming there ever was one.

And if you do not think any of this means anything, consider the following: when then-Governor George W. Bush, hardly the sharpest knife in the drawer, ran for President in 2000, he had a strong relationship with his media throng, and routinely had exchanges with his reporters in his traveling entourage. All of this was documented in "Ambling Into History," an interesting little book by Frank Bruni, one of those 2000 traveling reporters for The New York Times.

If George W. Bush circa 2000 can sit and answer questions from all comers in 2000 -- way before he had the benefit of the presidency to educate him -- what does it say that Sarah Palin cannot even endure that minor trial of the campaign?