Apparently Gwen Ifill’s writing a very complimentary book about our Democratic nominee for President, Barack Obama. No bias here. Move along citizen. Why in the world didn’t the McCain campaign know about this? Are they all fast asleep over there? With all the credit we can give that campaign for some of those clever web ads, the McCain team hasn’t been earning their paychecks in the last 2 weeks. There are many things we can point to as far as mistakes they have made so far — the rollout of Sarah Palin, the fumbling around on the economy, the failure (until recently) to attack Barack on the issues that matter in this election — to name a few. But even if they failed to “vet” Ifill and whether she could possibly be objective moderating this debate, McCain is handling this correctly.
Making a big deal about this only hurts McCain. They can’t pull Sarah from this debate, no matter what legitimate concerns they may have (internally) about this. There are no unbiased moderators left in this country, so that’s not an reasonable option. Sarah Palin needs to show up, tweak the media and the Democrats, promote her candidate, and survive the gentle pokes by Joe Biden. She can do this. If it goes badly for her, the campaign will continue to push the extensive media bias theme, and it only advances their point on that. Of course, if Palin does not do well here, McCain has bigger problems than a biased media.