Hide the Palin

The strategy the McCain team has taken of shielding Sarah Palin from one-on-one interviews (at least so far) is an interesting one, and I wonder how long they can keep it up?

After all, there's been a steady drip-drip of questions and information being uncovered that call into question the "reformer" mantle that she has claimed. These include:

• "Thanks but no thanks" on the Bridge to Nowhere


• Pork-barrel politics and earmarks


• Husband's membership in a secessionist group


• Charging the state for children's "official" travel, per diem, etc.


• Trooper-gate and the firing of state employees


• Views of her church, her pastor, ...

Can the strategy of ignoring the press really work, and will all of these stories just go away if Palin refuses to address them, or will the drip turn into a flood that cannot go unrefuted at some point?

One interesting viewpoint from Newsweek about the impact that the blogs are having on this:

That said, the most interesting thing about today's give-and-take is not that Palin and McCain are misleading the public. In politics, that happens all the time. It's that the Internet--and, through the Internet, the Obama campaign--is forcing major media outlets to repeatedly reject the Bridge to Nowhere deception. In the past, Time and NEWSWEEK and the Times and the Post would've run a thorough factcheck the first time the falsehood surfaced. But then they would've ignored subsequent repetitions. .... But now sites like TPM are (in their own words) forcing "the same news orgs that debunked the original Bridge to Nowhere falsehood" to "aggressively stay on McCain and hold him accountable every time he and his campaign repeat it." That's a certain kind of progress.