What Didn't He Know And When Didn't He Know It

McCain and his team did not know that Bristol Palin was pregnant, of that I feel pretty certain. The evidence seems to suggest that they knew very little in fact about their choice for VP. Only now as they race a team to Alaska to start digging will they get the full story. Sadly, they will also begin scrubbing furiously.

McCain and his team were caught flat-footed as the revelations dropped continuously yesterday, from bloggers and the MSM. Her support for the Bridge to Nowhere, her membership in the AIP, the full details of the Troopergate mess, her hiring of a lobbyist for the town of Wasilla while mayor to bring in $8 mil in funding, her use of emminent domain to acquire land for Wasilla's sports complex and the subsequent court case that cost the town $1.7 mil, and of course, the baby, were just a few of the items that blew through the media. Any one of them would have made for a bad day in campaign. The sheer quantity may have actually saved them - who could keep up?

Revelations that she also hired an attorney for the Trooper ethics investigation couldn't even be spun well. The campaign said that the attorney was hired weeks ago, but his letter to the investigator for evidence info and to request that he be present for any questioning was dated August 29th, the day Palin was announced. That seems to indicate a much later hiring. What attorney would wait three weeks to tell an investigator not to talk to his client without him? It's obvious that the attorney was a campaign idea suggested perhaps no more than the day before the announcement.

Bill McAllister, Palin's own press secretary admitted that as late as last Saturday he didn't know of Bristol's pregnancy. Her own press secretary? After the pregnancy was announced yesterday Bloggers and MSM types started their searching. Myspace pages were quickly found belonging to the father and his sister that featured photos not just of them, but the entire Palin family. By the end of the day they had been scrubbed. It seems unlikely that had the campaign known of the pregnancy beforehand those pages would have been up at all.

That scrubbing does not bode well for new revelations. With the vetting team on the ground, but the choice of Palin having already been made, their job is no longer to dig up the dirt, but instead is to keep it buried. They will scrub furiously and perhaps even intimidate to keep anything else from slipping through the cracks. There is too much riding on this.

So what might we miss?

Well, there's her use of executive privilege as governor to prevent full accountability regarding her administration's workings. Andrew Halcro points out requests for emails filed under the Freedom of Information Act that were denied due to "Deliberative Process and Executive Privilege". The funny thing is Todd Palin, Sarah's husband had been copied on the emails requested. Todd is not a member of the administration - he, like the rest of us, is a private citizen. To claim executive privilege yet copy an ordinary citizen regularly makes a sham of the process. Most of the emails seem to have a great deal to do with dismissals of administration officials, usually with substantial claims of vindictiveness involved.

That's Palin's way of doing business apparently. And one has to wonder if McCain would care... even if he knew.