When I first weighed in on John McCain's decision to "suspend" his campaign and swoop into Washington, I said that "for the moment, this is almost all upside for McCain, at least politically." One reason was that the maneuver shifted the media spotlight off of campaign manager Rick Davis's ties to Freddie Mac--then the MSM's scandale du jour--and onto potentially favorable terrain. That's still true. In the 24 hours since McCain's announcement, NEWSWEEK's indefatigable investigative ace Michael Isikoff has reported that "Davis has remained the treasurer and a corporate director of his lobbying firm this year, despite repeated statements by campaign officials that he had ended his relationship with the firm in 2006"--and no one seemed to notice. But now I'm starting to suspect that there's another beneficiary of McCain's misdirection.

Her name: Sarah Palin.

Perhaps you've heard of her? The media's monomaniacal obsession for nearly a month, the Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee seems to have slipped from the headlines somewhat in the day since McCain captured the chattering classes' attention. Which is interesting, given that it's the same day that she gave her first (mini) press conference and sat for only her second nonpartisan interview (with CBS News' Katie Couric). What's also interesting is that Palin's belated burst of accessibility was not without its bumps.

Now, I'm not suggesting that McCain suspended his campaign to distract from his running mate's media debut. That's a stretch. But Palin--and by extension, McCain--have certainly benefited from the fact that the bailout brouhaha prevented a pair of less-than-flattering exchanges with Couric from making the sort of impact they would have made had Mr. McCain not, in fact, gone to Washington. (McCain scheduled a single last-minute interview yesterday--with Couric--and it was his chat, not Palin's, that led the CBS Evening News.)

The first exchange aired last night. Asked a predictable question--"Other than supporting stricter regulations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac two years ago, can you give us any more examples of his leading the charge for more oversight?"--Palin was stumped. As a fiscal conservative, McCain has long been opposed to market regulation--so there's not a huge record to refer to. Still, Palin could've mentioned McCain's push to "require that companies treat stock options granted to employees as expenses on their balance sheets" in the wake of the Enron collapse, or his early call for the resignation of SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt. Instead, she simply repeated Couric's Freddie and Fannie example. "That's paramount," added Palin. When Couric pressed harder, noting that McCain "has been in Congress for 26 years [and]... has almost always sided with less regulation, not more," Palin fell back on tangential talking points. "He's also known as the maverick, though," she said. It wasn't until Couric asked a second time for "specific examples in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation" that Palin finally begged off. "I'll try to find you some and I'll bring them to you," she offered. Not exactly to the best way to convince voters that "John McCain will reform the way Wall Street does business"--a favorite Palin line--or keep yourself out of an Obama attack ad.

The second exchange--which airs tonight on CBS--was even odder. Asked why "Alaska's proximity to Russia... enhances [her] foreign policy credentials"--something that Palin and McCain have repeatedly said--Palin seemed to suggest (uncomfortably) that she'd spent her two years as governor protecting the country from imminent invasion:

PALIN: Well, it certainly does because our-- our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They're in the state that I am the executive of. And there in Russia--

COURIC: Have you ever been involved with any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

PALIN: We have trade missions back and forth. We-- we do-- it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where-- where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is-- from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to-- to our state.

Even if the danger of Russia invading the U.S. was as clear and present as Palin seems to imply--hint: it's not--there's no evidence that public servants absorb foreign-policy expertise by osmosis, simply because their state is near another country. To rack up credentials, they have to actually engage in, you know, diplomacy, or military action, or legislative work, or something. Palin could've said that Russian war planes stage regular exercises in the buffer zone around Alaska and that she's kept tabs on their movements as commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard. But instead she launched into an implausible--and irrelevant--"Red Dawn" scenario that made her sound less informed and more unsteady than she may actually be.

Is any of this--barring our imminent war with the Bear--the end of the world? Of course not. Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden misspeaks constantly on the trail. In fact, I cataloged a bunch of his mistakes earlier this week. But that's precisely Palin's problem. Joe Biden says so much stuff in public--he's done nearly 100 interviews since the Democratic National Convention--that, after awhile, the gaffes start to seem like a small, unremarkable part of his larger oeuvre. "Whatever traps he sets for himself, however many minorities he offends, he always seems to wriggle out," writes Chris Beam over at Slate. "It's almost as if, by committing so many gaffes, he has become immune to their effects. 'Joe Biden Makes Gaffe' is the new 'Dog Bites Man.'" In other words, Biden isn't defined by his slips because he's already defined himself.

In contrast, Palin is an unknown quantity--and by sequestering her from the press and the public, the McCain campaign seems determined to keep her that way. The result of restricting her public remarks like this, however, is that it ratchets up the importance of the few unscripted things she does say. So relatively minor errors on Russia and regulation end up attracting an outsize amount of scrutiny--and possibly reinforcing the impression that Palin is "uninformed" or "unsteady." People interested in how she performs in the presidential pressure-cooker--without a script--have only these meager scraps to go on. 

McCain supporters will undoubtedly say that any and all scrutiny of Palin is the product of outrageous media bias. Some of it has been off-base. The early questions about whether she could balance the vice-presidency with motherhood were blatantly sexist. The conspiracy theories about her pregnancy were simply offensive. That said, the vast majority of inquiries are not even remotely unfair. Couric's were pretty gentle, in fact--standard running-mate fare. Conservatives may be sold on Palin. That's terrific. But some voters--i.e., the voters who will likely decide the election--still want to know more. Forty-nine percent of all respondents in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, for example, said the Alaska governor is not qualified to be president. They want to see Palin show her stuff--and I have no doubt she could. But by bottling her up, McCain and Co. risk letting her gaffes define her.

This week, Palin got a pass. Her interview with Couric attracted far less attention than it would've during a quieter news cycle--and that's one major benefit of McCain's bailout maneuver. But there are still 40 days until Nov. 4. And something tells me the luxury of distraction won't last.

UPDATE, Sept. 26: The American Prospect's Ezra Klein points out another potential drawback of keeping Palin under wraps:

The fact that Palin's responses to questions are becoming increasingly incoherent rather than rapidly more polished is interesting. Rote memorization should have all but eliminated the overlay of nonsense in her answers by now. Matt Yglesias offers a decent hypothesis, saying, "It’s possible that all this cramming is causing Palin to become less coherent — instead of just parrying questions she knows she doesn’t have good answers to, she’s trying to remember canned lines but it’s too much all at once to actually get right."... These aren't lies she's telling. It's not misdirection, or deception. It's just nonsense. It exists in a realm beyond where truth is a relevant concept, more akin to the utterances of sleeptalkers than to the prevarications of politicians. I always figured that Palin's trouble on the trail would come when she was exposed to the obscure questions of governance: Queries on drug policy and Afghani tribes and Medicare reimbursement. But instead, she's collapsing on the big questions, the issues that she should be able to dispatch with a memorized soundbite.