Inform Your Consent

Today Sarah Palin appears to have met briefly with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, in what was a highly anticipated but ultimately secretive encounter.  The McCain campaign only allowed for still photos and video coverage.  They explicitly banned any writers from covering the meeting which led the networks to refuse to air photo and video coverage.  The campaign then reversed itself- sort of – by letting one writer witness a full twenty-nine seconds at the beginning of the meeting, during which Palin and Karzai discussed Karzai’s young son, born last year:

“What is his name?,” Palin asked.

“Mirwais,” Karzai responded. “Mirwais, which means, ‘The Light of the House.’”

“Oh nice,” Palin responded.

“He is the only one we have,” remarked Karzai.

Well that was revealing.  Of course, if you were left wanting more, a McCain campaign aide was more than happy to oblige with his memory of the day’s events, which included meetings with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (he counts on the World Leader Tally, right?).

As McCain and Palin left an event in Strongsville, Ohio today, reporters shouted questions that went ignored.  Before getting herded back into the infuriatingly useless press pool van, a reporter yelled the question the best describes the media’s frustration with what has become an inaccessible campaign:

Governor Palin has given two interviews, and taken one unplanned question since she became John McCain’s running mate.  But with the candidate at the top of the ticket not taking questions either, is it any wonder why the McCain campaign laments its lack of positive coverage in the press?  Don’t you have to make yourself available to coverage in order to expect coverage?

The 15-minute press conference John McCain held Tuesday afternoon in Freeland, Mich., where reporters were permitted to ask four economy-related questions, should not have been big news.

It was though, because it was the first the Republican candidate for president of the United States has held since August 13—when the Russian invasion of Georgia was front-page news and more than two weeks before Sarah Palin joined the ticket and attention turned to field-dressing moose and dolling up pit bulls.

In that stretch, John McCain has all but cut himself off from the national press corps, an increasingly frustrated contingent of political scribes rumbling through battleground states on the campaign’s second-tier bus.

National reporters – left with time to linger over primary season memories of three press avails a day – also assert that they have an institutional memory from covering the campaign for months that makes them more able to scrutinize McCain more closely, and less likely to fall for the campaign’s spin. And they claim that local reporters sometimes run out of questions for the candidate.

No wonder the campaign prefers the press to get back in the van.