The Cone of Silence, Wagging the Dog and the Return of Dave

From various news reports:
"According to the Associated Press, a McCain campaign aide "told the journalists on board that all Palin flights would be off the record unless the media were told otherwise. At least one reporter objected. Two people on the flight said the Palins greeted the media and they chatted about who had been to Alaska, but little else was said."

TW: Thursday night Ms. Palin will provide her first interview to ABC and Charlie Gibson, my assumption is that she will do fine. The interview will be very controlled, presumeably she has been prepping feverishly, she is intelligent and articulate.

The interview from my perspective is essentially irrelevant.

I have made numerous references in this blog to the 1990's movie, Wag the Dog with Robert DeNiro in which the DeNiro character created a fictitious war in order to spin favorably his clients electoral positioning. Modern day campaigns use similiar, if not quite literal, tactics often. The Republicans have it down to a science. When I see the Dog being Wagged I will note it in the blog titles.

However, the more relevant movie analogy relative to the cone of silence imposed around Ms. Palin is not Wag the Dog but Dave. Another 1990's flick starring Kevin Kline (yet another distinguished IU alum btw) as the Presidential lookalike thrust into the role of actual President due to unforeseen and utterly ridiculous circumstances. In Dave the Kline character was sequestered from the public and press while various advisors injected him with enough policy and rhetoric to make him professionally functional.

A similiar exercise is apparently in process with Ms. Palin.

For the first time in history we have a VP nominee who has been sequestered from the press and any public questioning but for extremely limited and minutely controlled events. The very fact that the McCain campaign believes it necessary to sequester its candidate speaks to the inherent vacuousness of the selection. Imagine 60 days from the Presidential election, a VP nominee so inexperienced in national and international governance, so lacking in his or her own perspectives on those national and international issues that she must be injected by advisors with every possible policy plank and talking point. One reads stories of "cram sessions" with distinguished foreign policy and domestic policy advisors. This is the United States, the most powerful nation in the world, the alleged beacon for hope and leadership for billions throughout the world. And Ms. Sarah "Dave" Palin is in cram sessions.