Okay, then. If this is the CW the media’s settled on, ain’t going to be me who objects. Whew!

Today was a pretty low-key day, politically, so neither candidate gained or lost too much ground. But Sarah Palin confronted a major obstacle in her interview with Charlie Gibson – her first one-on-one as a vice presidential candidate – and appears to have held her own. It remains to be seen whether her opponents will find useful fodder in this interview [Errrr. — ed.], but at the very least she didn’t deviate from the campaign message. McCain also held a successful event this morning in Pennsylvania – in a largely non-political news cycle, he didn’t need to do much else.

Actually, the left thinks she did deviate from it, but if so, she only ended up in the same place as Bush and Obama. Whew again!

Maybe we should stop focusing on interviews with news anchors and start focusing on interviews with people who can swing votes. Exit question one: Could/should have McCain’s handlers prepared her better? The path to ruin runs through too much rote memorization, warns TNR. I wonder if Team Maverick neglected to brief her on the Bush Doctrine on the assumption that she surely must have picked it up sometime over the past six years and therefore could handle a question on that herself. Imagine their horror tonight in realizing they assumed wrong, and that there may be other basic knowledge gaps that need filling — fast. Exit question two: Having stumped the band with that one, will Gibson turn around tomorrow and go for the throat by quizzing her about other basic stuff? The risk is that his time is limited and if she’s prepared it’ll turn into a softball game. The reward is that if she isn’t prepared, look out.