The conventional wisdom is that Sarah Palin doesn’t make herself available to the national news media, but as this CBS News story shows that simply isn’t true.
It was less than two weeks ago when Sarah Palin astonished her traveling press corps by lifting the curtain (literally) and journeying to the back of her campaign plane to answer reporters’ questions for the first time after 40 days on the campaign trail. But the candidate who has been criticized for having a bunker mentality when it came to the national media can now lay legitimate claim to being more accessible than either Joe Biden or Barack Obama.
In the past two days alone, Palin has answered questions from her national press corps on three separate occasions. On Saturday, she held another plane availability, and on Sunday, she offered an impromptu press conference on the tarmac upon landing in Colorado Springs. A few minutes later, she answered even more questions from reporters during an off-the-record stop at a local ice cream shop.
By contrast, Biden hasn’t held a press conference in more than a month, and Obama hasn’t taken questions from his full traveling press corps since the end of September.
One of my biggest complaints about the McCain campaign is how they handled Gov. Palin after she was announced as John McCain’s running mate. Personally, I think they made a huge mistake by keeping her away from the media in the weeks after the convention. They would have been much better off scheduling interviews on talk radio so she could introduce herself and tell her story directly to voters.
H/T: Ed Morrissey.