Can Palin climb the Ifill tower?

By now, most everyone has heard that Gwen Ifill, moderator of this year's Veep debate, has a book timed to come out when the new president takes office in January that not too subtly celebrates the considerable political achievements of Sen. Obama -- and that this fact wasn't disclosed to the McCain campaign when negotiations were going on over debate formats, moderators, and rules.

Newsflash! Debate moderation is stacked in the Democratic candidate's favor! You don't say... Let's see, debate moderators are journalists, journalists are 90% Dem. Wow. What a shocker to learn that a debate moderator likes the Dem candidate!

Ifill is just as capable of getting snarky as any other television news personality (as she momentarily did with Cheney 4 years ago,) but she has had years of experience on PBS cultivating a liberal but even-handed approach, she has a keen mind, and she has absorbed a lot of the calm Jim Lehrer demeanor that generally serves about as well as any in these debates. Give us Gwen Ifill -- even if she is a rabid Obama partisan -- any day over some of the clowns on television today. Ifill is more capable than most of divorcing her personal views from her performance as an interviewer.

And, let's just say it: if Gov. Sarah Palin can't handle Gwen Ifill, then the McCain/Palin ticket has much bigger problems on its hands than who is moderating a debate. Part of being a Republican candidate (and officeholder) is knowing how to deal with a media that votes 90% Democratic and can't be expected to be able to keep their partisan leanings under wrap most of the time, let alone all the time.

Palin hasn't looked good in her first couple of major interviews -- she has seemed over-coached, like a college freshman who has been cramming for a final exam. And in many ways, the job of a Veep is harder than that of the candidate. John McCain knows what he thinks, knows how he voted, and just gets to say it -- and defend it however he likes. Sarah Palin has to memorize what John McCain thinks, how he voted, and has to defend it in the way McCain would defend it. And since she hasn't had months of experience at being a McCain surrogate on television face-offs (in the way that a Tim Pawlenty or Mike Huckabee has had,) she is needing to cover a lot of ground, fast.

John McCain's gamble was that she would be politically bright enough to be able to pull it off. We're about to find out. Fortunately, just as before her knock-out speech at the RNC, expectations have been lowered to the point where if Palin gets off the debate stage without drooling on herself, she will have succeeded. Palin isn't going to impress Ifill -- or any other journalist, Democratic activist, or university academic. She won't "win" the debate, and was never going to. She was selected to connect with the average voter, and her success in this debate (besides not drooling on herself or threatening to burn books about evolution) will be measured by how well she is able to climb right over the Ifill tower, communicating directly to those average voters.