Below The Beltway

After several weeks of very bad press and even worse interviews, the McCain campaign has put Sarah Palin in seclusion in preparation for Thursday’s debate:

(CNN)– Gov. Sarah Palin will now spend two and a half days near Sedona, Arizona, to prepare for Thursday’s debate, instead of prepping in St Louis, as originally planned.

Sarah Palin will be at John McCain’s rustic creek side home outside Sedona for what a top aide calls “debate camp.”

The aide, who’s part of the team prepping Palin, tells CNN they decided to take her to debate camp there because it is an “invigorating and enjoyable place to prepare for Thursday.”

It also has the advantage of being about as far away from the media and the debate over the bailout bill as you can get in the Lower 48.

Additionally, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that McCain’s advisers have essentially taken direct control of Palin:

The McCain campaign moved its top officials inside Gov. Sarah Palin’s operation Sunday to prepare for what is certain to be the most important event of her vice-presidential campaign: her debate on Thursday with Democrat Joe Biden.

Additionally, at the urging of the Republican presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain, Gov. Palin will leave late Monday for his Arizona ranch to prepare for the high-stakes debate.

The moves follow several shaky performances by Gov. Palin last week and come amid concern and grumbling from Republicans, and even a few queries from her husband, Todd Palin, according to campaign operatives and Republican officials.

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis and senior adviser Steve Schmidt are planning to coach the candidate ahead of the debate, according to senior advisers. They traveled Sunday to meet the Republican vice-presidential nominee in Philadelphia. After her appearance with Sen. McCain at a rally in Columbus, Ohio, these top officials plan to fly with her on Monday to Sen. McCain’s ranch in Sedona, Ariz., which they hope she will find a comforting place to prep, these people said.

More broadly, the McCain campaign aims to halt what it sees as a perceived decline in the crispness and precision of Gov. Palin’s latest remarks as well as a fall in recent polls, according to several advisers and party officials.

And there have been some, most recently Mitt Romney, who have called on the McCain campaign to set Palin free from her handlers and, to borrow a phrase from The West Wing, let Palin be Palin. The problem with that suggestion is that the American public has had so little exposure to Palin outside of photo ops, rallies before adoring crowds,  and two disastrous interviews that it’s hard to say who the real Sarah Palin is, and it’s logical to assume that the person we’ve seen talking to Couric and Gibson is the “real” Sarah Palin.

It’s not only the McCain/Palin campaign that needs to be nervous about Thursday’s debate, though, Andrew Malcom notes that the Democrats are at risk as well precisely because the expectations for Palin are so low:

[B]y keeping the governor herself largely away from the media, the McCain campaign is, in effect, playing a prevent defense, ceding the public relations playing field to others to describe, define and caricature Palin, strangely unanswered by her for a week now.

(…)
The upcoming downside for the Obama-Biden campaign is that its supporters became so flustered over Palin’s surprisingly explosive popularity coming out of the GOP convention. They have so successfully mocked, derided and lowered expectations for Palin in Thursday night’s VP debate that if she doesn’t drool or speak in tongues, many millions still open to persuasion will be impressed.

Al Gore’s campaign made the exact same mistake going into the 2000 debates. So all Texas Gov. George W. Bush had to do was not lose.

In that sense, Democrats may have played right into a PR cul-de-sac. Biden, for instance, described Palin as merely better-looking than him. A far better communications strategy would have been to insincerely portray Palin with superlatives as a superwoman, making it harder, not easier, for her to impress. Too late now.

So we could wake up Friday morning to an entirely new race with an entirely new Sarah Palin.