Skip ahead to 4:30 for a little damage control after last night’s e-mail leak. Naturally HuffPo and Mediaite are conveniently omitting the flattering things Miller said here about Palin — “she’s done phenomenal things for this country,” “she’s elevated the debate,” and, like the rest of the field, she’d do a better job than The One — in favor of emphasizing his more legalistic answer towards the end. That said, he’s clearly very, very uncomfortable with the idea of the race becoming a Murkowski/Palin proxy fight, which is interesting because Murkowski seems uncomfortable with it too. Aside from the zinger she launched at Palin during the announcement of her write-in bid, she hasn’t mentioned Palin’s connection to Miller at all lately as far as I know. I assume the blackout on Sarahcuda is due to neither side feeling confident enough about how Alaskans view her right now to risk injecting her into the race. If Miller thought voters up there loved her, presumably he’d be running ad after ad mentioning her; if Murkowski thought they didn’t love her, ditto. Or have those ads been running and I’ve simply missed them? Alaskans, please advise.

In case you haven’t seen it already at the Standard, here’s Todd Palin’s response to the e-mail flap:

My family has worked hard in supporting Joe Miller, so when I heard he’d said something less than supportive of my wife’s efforts, I responded. But it turns out we’d gotten our wires crossed and Joe hadn’t said anything like what I’d been told. So there’s no story here except the fact that the press put our personal emails online again, and again couldn’t even be bothered to conceal our email addresses or take any steps to protect our privacy.

He ripped Miller a new one without even confirming that Miller said what he supposedly said? That sounds … familiar, actually. She really is qualified to be president!