The loose talk about a “rushed” vetting process on Palin, including from reporters who could actually look into it, strikes me as pretty silly and lazy. It has seemed since he first won the nomination that McCain would be choosing his running mate from a relatively short list (about 10 people) and that Palin was on it. Since at least the end of May when the leader of McCain’s VP vetting team (Arthur Culvahouse, not exactly a novice at this) was spotted in Juneau, it has also seemed like Palin made it to a fairly advanced stage in that process and was one of the people being interviewed. That suggests that a pretty extensive early vetting had been completed by then. The full vetting process takes months of research, interviews, document review, and re-interviews. The campaign, like modern presidential campaigns do, had a fairly large team of people devoted to the effort, working in parallel on the potential running mates who made it to the latter stages of the process. The final decision evidently wasn’t made until last week, but the vetting process is there to provide the candidate with a choice among several finalists all of whom have been vetted, and that process (public source research, extensive questionnaire, document review, a lengthy vetting report to the candidate, interviews with the lawyers) clearly included Palin. In the final week, the campaign had succeeded in persuading most of us that the final list was basically Romney, Pawlenty, and Lieberman, when clearly it wasn’t, but it was obviously still clear that the formal vetting process, which was done by then, had included more than those three. To make something of the fact that Palin’s next door neighbor wasn’t interviewed is just absurd—no campaign does that kind of thing, it would plainly tip off the press and wouldn’t do much good. After the announcement, a much more public team of communications folks from the campaign goes to the home state to get final things in order, and that seems to have happened here too. What took place both before and after last week’s decision just doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. The fact that the political mavens were surprised doesn’t mean the McCain team did something wrong–quite the contrary.
Between pushing this rushed vetting story and ganging up on a pregnant 17-year-old, this is certainly looking like a week they won’t want to commemorate in the Newseum.