“The most accessible of the four candidates”

That would be…Gov. Palin.
Granted, none of the four has the kind of open relationship with the media that McCain had for many years before he reorganized his campaign under Steve Schmidt, accepting as the price of a more disciplined message operation the end of his bantering ways with the traveling press.
UPDATE: Of course, one could write volumes on the questions Obama hasn’t been asked.
Here’s one set of questions we didn’t hear at the McCain-Obama debates: Is there a war on terror? Do we plan on staying on the offensive against radical Islam? Or are we pursuing a strictly localized war in Afghanistan and Western Pakistan against the Taliban and the remnants of the old Al Qaeda leadership, and otherwise dealing with the rest of the region and the world as a series of discrete and localized issues unconnected by ideological struggle?
That set of questions was the predominant issue in the 2004 election. We got questions on individual foreign policy areas, but the central question of our overarching strategy in this war, and whether we will even continue prosecuting it as such after January 20, never cameup in the debates. I think we can all offer an educated guess as to what Obama’s answer is, but it would have been nice to put the question to him before a national audience.
SECOND UPDATE: Just to pick one example: Patterico notes a contrast between an LA Times profile of Palin’s college career and the absence of interest in Obama’s time at Columbia. Tom Maguire and Andy McCarthy have more thoughts on that particular omission. (Amusingly, the LA Times says nobody remembers Palin from college, but then goes on to quote at length from three college classmates and a competitor from the beauty pageants she competed in to pay tuition. And a side note about the photo: the 80s called, they wish to apologize to Gov. Palin). Meanwhile, a number of Obama’s friends from that period refuse to talk. I referred to this “missing witness” problem the other day in the Joe the Plumber post – with Obama there’s a long track record from his past of people who won’t talk or can’t be located (Byron York had that problem even with his State Senate colleagues), as well as ongoing stonewalls and/or destruction of records (as Jim Geraghty relates here, here, and here), even articles suddenly disappearing from the web (see here and here). It certainly seems as if there is a concerted and continuing effort to protect Obama from reporting on his past.

17 thoughts on ““The most accessible of the four candidates””

  1. Well, I can see the interest in Palin’s college career, since it spanned two schools in Hawaii, two in Idaho, and a whistle stop in Alaska. I give her credit for sticking it out (for real).
    Obama went to Columbia and Harvard. Dull. Pretty damn good, but dull. Crank, check your Alumni directory, he finished MCL.
    Look, there isn’t much investigation into McCain either, and he finished in the George Armstrong Custer spot at Annapolis (in other words, in the bottom 5–well I think Custer was the very last, McCain, next to last).

  2. Daryl, you left out one of Obama’s colleges.
    As the LAT profile notes, the detour to school in Alaska was financially motivated.

  3. I agree Crank, Columbia and Harvard what was Obama thinking he should have gone to general admission schools like Palin.

  4. You’re about 8 years too late with your concern about “stonewalls and/or destruction of records”.
    Blindingly partisan.

  7. Magrooder, you can read the link I take the quote from and the supporting facts cited therein, or you can splutter. Palin’s more available to the press the last week or two than Obama or Biden or McCain. Obama hasn’t taken press questions this month.
    Of course, you could not make up the silly things interviewers do to embarrass her.

  8. Crank, this entire hatefest on Obama reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where the other comic stage show was called “Jerry Seinfeld is the Devil” .
    Which questions were made to make Palin look silly? Was it her I can see Russia answer or Putin pops his head up. Maybe it was what magazines she reads. She has given two national interviews but that makes her more open to the public.
    If you can look closely you can see her slowly moving away from McCain and into position for her own run in four years. By the way I am more pro american than you, another gem.

  10. “Palin’s more available to the press the last week or two . . . ”
    THAT is the basis for your claim. If you define the period of time you are talking about — Tuesday between 610 and 615 pm — down so low, you can make “data” show anything. Lies, damn lies and statistics.
    Once the two-week honeymoon was over, she has killed McCain. The increased accessibility hasn’t exactly helped — she doesn’t know what the vice President does?
    McCain and Obama and, to a slightly lesser extent, Biden have been campaigning for many months and, despite your continued cries of ignorance, are well-known figures. Palin is a mystery to most of the country, which had never heard of her before August.

  11. Magrooder, the relevant point is, there’s this false idea out there that she doesn’t take questions; she’s been doing a lot of that the last few weeks, and your guys have not, so it might be advisable to drop the talking point about her not doing press conferences because it is disconnected from reality. That’s the point.

  12. Most republicans are disappointed with Palin, and McCain’s choice of a VP, but really, McCain is the lesser of two evils, when our other choice is Obama and his lefty illuminati politicans in DC and even when he is interviewed, no one can get a straight answer out of him….atleast Palin stays on target and actually attempts to answer the question, unlike Obama.

  13. RNC chips in for Palin’s fashion? Sweet! I’m glad Entertainment Tonight is giving us the scoop(s) we need to make informed decisions. But how well can she dance?
    I wonder what designer labels The One is sporting? Where’s the “fairness”?

  14. The $70M+ obsession you guys had with Whitewater struck me as a little excessive at the time, considering the whole point of it was apparently for anyone who hadn’t yet to see Clinton’s dick.
    Oh Christ, it just occurred to me. The New Klan- I mean the Republican Party- is going to go apeshit with a real black guy’s penis in the oval office. I guess it’s time to bring Starr out of the closet again.

  15. Crank, taking few questions from Faux News and local reporters, even sitting down with the network anchors (with dad thereto help her through it), is NOT a press conference.

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