In less than two months America will elect a new president. Now, for months, Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his campaign have highlighted “experience” and “readiness” as the qualifying factors for the position of President.  The question to ask then is simple:  Why, if readiness is of such importance, is McCain unwilling to have his running mate Sarah Palin take even softball friendly interviews?  Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has a theory:

Sarah Palin could be the President of the United States in four and a half months. We tend to think of this as an abstraction; but it’s true. And yet today she’s so unprepared and knows so little about the challenges and tasks facing the country that she can’t even give a softball interview.

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As is so often the case, Palin is the incarnation of the Republican slurs. The darling of the hard-right; she gives stem-winding speeches. She pushes all their buttons. But she’s such a lightweight, they can’t risk letting her answer a few questions. Not even on Fox. They know she’s not ready and probably never will be. But they think the politics might work for them.

McCain is playing a dangerous game here. They openly mock Barack Obama’s accomplishments as a community organizer, they whitewash his record as state and federal senator and they ignore the fact he’s showed near-prescient judgment in foreign affairs when even their own candidate has been wrong on nearly every issue.  They do all of this so they can charge him as “unready”.  So is this really a game they want to play?  The media will likely only “play along” for so long and we’re already starting to see a backlash.

Since February, when the McCain campaign talked about going to war with [the New York Times] over a front-page article that included allegations of an improper relationship with a female lobbyist, there have been several public disputes. This past Tuesday, a McCain spokesperson described Elisabeth Bumiller, one the reporters on the McCain beat, as a “fiction” writer.

“I know whether or not they cooperate with us, we will be very actively looking into who [Palin] is, what she’s done, what her record is — as much as we can learn about her in as concentrated a time as we can,” Stevenson said.

“One of the costs to them of not putting her out there,” he added, “is the coverage is going to define her as much as the campaign.”

In honor of this media blackout Centerpoint Review will begin running a (possibly) limited-time community ad highlighting the time since Palin last gave an interview.  You can find it in the sidebar below memeorandum headlines.

Only time will tell how long McCain keeps his veep sequestered and that ad stays up but, as Joe Biden says, “Eventually, she’s going to have to sit in front of you like I’m doing and have done. Eventually, she’s going to have to answer questions and not be sequestered. Eventually, she’s going to have to answer on the record.”