McCain then looked around the room and gestured as if to welcome questions. The AP reporter shouted a question at Gov. Palin (“Governor, what have you learned from your meetings?”) but McCain aide Brooke Buchanan intervened and shepherded everybody out of the room.

Palin looked surprised, leaned over to McCain and asked him a question, to which your pooler thinks he shook his head as if to say “No.” ~Jonathan Martin

Steve Benen observes:

The McCain campaign apparently believes the Republican vice presidential nominee is some kind of child, under strict instructions not to speak.

It is inexplicable that they insist on keeping Palin, reportedly a “quick study” by most accounts, from demonstrating how quickly she has been able to get up to speed on various policy matters.  Assuming that she is capable of handling even basic questions, there is now much more to be lost by continuing to hide her away than there is if she starts giving answers and says something wrong.  The debate is eight days away, and she has answered just one impromptu question from a journalist up until now.  Her credibility as a national candidate has done nothing but diminish over the last three weeks since her acceptance speech, and the interviews she has given have not done much to bolster it.  At this point, even if she gave some heavily-scripted answer to a generic question it would be a dramatic improvement.  One week from tomorrow she will have to follow up McCain’s debate performance and make a persuasive case for herself and the campaign on national television, and she will have to answer fairly specific policy questions, and it doesn’t seem likely that she will do very well.  The first presidential debate will focus on foreign policy, which makes it likely that many questions at the VP debate will relate to the answers that the presidential candidates gave the week before, and that will put Palin on the spot.  When Biden isn’t running his mouth about whatever pops into his head, he can be an extremely effective critic and advocate, as his remarks on McCain and foreign policy today demonstrate. 

Update: McCain’s move to suspend his campaign and delay the first debate in response to the financial crisis may make Palin’s debate with Biden the first debate of the general election, or it may mean that Palin’s debate will be pushed back even closer to Election Day.