Sarah Palin, Freed?

By Perry Bacon Jr.

GREENVILLE, N.C. -- After delivering scripted speeches for much of her candidacy and avoiding contact with reporters, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin spent about a dozen minutes chatting with the press on her campaign plane tonight -- the first time she has done so as a vice presidential candidate.

It may not quite be letting Sarah be Sarah, as some of her supporters have urged, but it was the most open that she has been on the campaign trail so far.

And, as she traveled through Florida the past couple of days, Palin also spoke to two local television stations. The other three candidates running for national office do this nearly every day, but not Palin -- until this week.

On her campaign plane, she took repeated questions about her emphasis the last few days on William Ayers, the 1960s radical who hosted an event for Barack Obama in 1995 but is not a close adviser to the Democratic nominee. As in her debate performance, she had a turn of phrase she kept repeating, arguing Obama's association with Ayers raised questions about his "judgment" and "forthrightness."

Asked if she was saying Obama was "dishonest," she returned to her theme.

"I'm not saying that he's dishonest," Palin said on the flight from Pensacola, Fla., to Greenville, "but in terms of judgment and in terms of being able to answer questions forthrightly, it has two different parts to this, that judgment and that truthfulness and just being able to answer very candidly a simple question about when did you know him, how did you know him, has been there been an association continued since '02 or '05. We've heard a couple of different stories. I think it's relevant."

She batted back questions about whether Americans were tired of divisive politics and wanted to hear more about the economy by saying Obama's comments about Ayers were related to those issues.

"It makes you wonder about the forthrightedness, the truthfulness of the plans that he is telling America in regards to the economic recovery because that is first and foremost on American's minds," she said.

In her conversation with reporters, Palin also explained her husband Todd's decision to testify in the investigation into her firing of the Alaska director of public safety, who had refused to fire her former brother-in-law, a state trooper.

"Nobody has anything to hide," she said. "Nobody's done anything wrong."

The governor referred to the incident as "Tasergate," referring to allegations that her former brother-in-law used a taser on his 11-year-old stepson, instead of what her critics call "Troopergate."

Asked if she would appear on Saturday Night Live with Tina Fey, who even Obama has noted shares a strong resemblance to the Palin, the Alaska governor smiled.

"She's a hoot and she's so talented and it would be fun to either imitate her or keep on giving her more material and keep her in business," Palin said....

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/10/08/sarah_palin_freed.html