I’ve been assuming that they did know and didn’t object so that they could drop this card at the eleventh hour and put Ifill on the spot. Now she either has to be scrupulously fair, almost to the point of being soft on Palin, or else she’s in the tank.

Greta says no, though. Go figure.

I confirmed for us here on GretaWire: the McCain campaign did NOT know about Gwen Ifill’s book (I think I told them when I made my efforts – emails about midnight – to find out!) I am stunned….the campaign (actually both) should have been told before the campaign agreed to have her moderate. It simply is not fair – in law, this would create a mistrial.

The first mention of Ifill’s book I found through some haphazard googling was in an AP story on July 22, although it came up again in this Kurtz profile of her in WaPo on September 4. She was announced as the VP debate moderator on August 5. The two sides agreed to the Debate Commission’s proposed schedule on August 21, although wrangling over the format of each event was still going on as recently as 10 days ago. Don’t the campaigns vet and sign off on the moderators? How’d they miss this little detail? Or is this a case of Team Maverick deciding that the racial demagoguery they’d get from the left for trying to have her removed because of a pro-Obama book made it simply not worth the aggravation?