In the tank: Gwen Ifill'er up

Conservative supporters of the Palin-McCain ticket, who aren't happy unless they have something to complain about, are today grumbling that the moderator for tomorrow night's vice presidential debate, PBS' Gwen Ifill, is writing a book with "Obama" in the title.

Ifill's projected opus means next to nothing at this point, but "the GOP base" should be grateful for yet another convenient excuse for AK Gov. Sarah Palin's questionable competence.

The subject came up during this morning's Morning Joe on MSNBC and somebody — I forget who — suggested that the McCain campaign should have been aware of this earlier, and hadn't objected to the debate commission, because the McCainiacs would have "googled" Gwen Ifill and learned about the work in progress.

But as the Republican mcbrain trust barely googled Sarah Palin herself, I find that explanation unconvincing.

Tomorrow's encounter between Palin and Delaware Senator Joe Biden is getting billed generally as one between two potential "gaffe machines." But Sarah Palin is less a "gaffe machine" than an inadvertent tosser of incomprehensible word salads.

She doesn't produce gaffes, she's a walking, talking gaffe. She can barely assemble a grammatically coherent sentence and even when she does, it has nothing to do with whatever inspired it.

Yes, it's a gaffe to talk about FDR appearing on television in 1929. The radio fireside chats Biden meant to invoke came later, when FDR actually was president. And yes, Biden should have credited the Welsh politician Neil Kinnock with the anecdote he recounted in 1988, as he had done every time he'd recounted it previously.

Incidentally, the reporter who made an issue of that initially, Maureen Dowd, was just barred from the McCain campaign plane.

But expressing dismay at one of your own campaign ads is not a gaffe. It's actually funny that Biden's critics would mention that, because Biden hadn't seen the ad, only heard its description by a reporter. And the same people who criticize Joe Biden don't trust reporters to describe anything. Including, now, Gwen Ifill.

Most observers know what to expect from Joe Biden. He's been around forever, and has participated in a number of these things. He's pretty good at them, and he's personable and entertaining too: "A noun, a verb, and 9/11."

He's also given upwards of 80 press interviews since being named Barack Obama's running mate. Sarah Palin has given three, including a laughable luv-a-fair with Sean Hannity. The last one, with Katie Couric, was a disastrous richness of embarrassments.

And when, in a rare unchaperoned moment, she concurred in Obama's receptiveness to chasing al-Qaeda into North Waziristan, kindly old Uncle John had to sit her down in front of Couric one more time to try and rescue her (even that attempt at rescue failed: a fair question from a potential constituent isn't "gotcha journalism").

The best thing for Joe Biden to do tomorrow is to mostly be quiet. Keep it short. Put a sock in it. Let Palin do the talking. Let her produce more delicious bowls of the now-trademarked word salads that make even her most fervent devotees recoil in abject horror.

Gwen Ifill's questions, whatever they are, will be largely irrelevant, as Palin is unlikely to address them anyway. All she will do is attack Obama, and she won't get that right either. It will be interesting to gauge Gwen Ifill's reaction to Palin's responses. Ifill is used to a McNeil-Lehrer level of dialogue, which is pretty high as American news media goes. She's no Sean Hannity. Thankfully.

The Palin apologists, despite their rapidly dwindling numbers, expect so little from their candidate that they'll praise her to highest heaven as long as she doesn't turn up drunk and roll into the orchestra pit.

Even then, they'd probably put it down to "folksy charm."

Polls are showing that Palin is quickly turning into pure poison for the GOP ticket. Obama is leading a number of them in Florida, where McCain has had the advantage for months. Palin may have the makings of an effective small town mayor but she's way out of her league in the federal system, that much is already painfully clear.

But this isn't so much about Sarah Palin as it is about John McCain's judgment. It's a preview of his presidency. And even without Palin, he's showing himself to be erratic, as evidenced by his bizarre maneuvering throughout the ongoing Wall Street episodes, or just plain intemperate, as during his own debate with Obama last week.

Senator McCain can't but be regretting that he made the decision to position an apparently clueless rube on his ticket, and he's going to regret it a lot more over the next few weeks as he's forced into some decidedly dirty campaigning. He's got no other choice.