There's a method in the assault on Gwen Ifill

There were three compelling reasons that PBS's Gwen Ifill was dumped squarely on the hot seat on the eve of her stint as moderator for the VP debate between GOP contender Sarah Palin and her Democratic rival Joe Biden. The squeal about her had absolutely nothing to do with her book, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama and by inference her alleged pro-Obama bias.

Her book isn't even on the stands yet and won't be until January 2009. It's anything but a pro-Obama book. True, he's the obvious spur for the book, but only that. The book profiles and interviews a bevy of black politicians, civil rights leaders, and black notables, young and old, and tells in their words and hers what impact they've had on Obama and the new breed of black officials.

The eleventh hour attack on Ifill's debate credentials also has nothing to do with her ability to be a fair and objective moderator. The Republican National Committee and the McCain campaign committee approved her weeks ago for the job. There were no gripes about her objectivity in 2004 when she moderated the VP debate between Vice President Dick Cheney and Democratic VP opponent John Edwards.

True reason number one for the anti-Ifill blast is VP candidate Sarah Palin. In the run-up to the debate, GOP operatives and the McCain campaign have kept up a drumbeat attack on the media for its alleged sexist, dismissive, and gender double standard bash of Palin. The attacks have shown some signs of working. There have been a spate of articles that have put a happy face spin on her family, her positions on terrorism, the bailout, and the energy crisis.  The attacks and the happy face articles have slightly defused the lopsided, and obsessive negative hits on Palin while deflecting attention from her colossal real and perceived inadequacies, lapses, and in some cases flat out ignorance of crucial foreign policy and economy issues. That was, of course, the idea behind the media attacks.

A too deep probe by Ifill into Palin's empty space on these issues before what shapes up to be a record smash viewing audience for a vice presidential debate could be a potentially election game changing disaster for McCain.

True reason number two for the Ifill knock is her longstanding role as a senior correspondent on PBS's Lehrer Hour. Though the Lehrer show generally gets high marks from conservatives for "balance" in its guests, topics and interviews, PBS is still the bane of many conservatives. They assail the network as a bastion of liberal bias, and have never stopped trying to exorcise that imagined bias from the network by on occasion pressuring Congress and the Bush administration to slash its funds and by trying to bully producers and management into spotlighting conservative preachments.

True reason number three for the Ifill rap is race. McCain and the Republican National Committee have carefully sanitized any thing that smacks of race from the campaign. But Ifill is a different matter. She is a black woman. That makes her an instant, and very convenient, way to reinforce the notion that African-Americans will go any lengths to get Obama elected solely because he's black. That mantra has been firmly etched in Election 2008 stone. Ifill is the breathing, talking symbol of the race card being flipped for Obama. 

Ifill is a consummate professional, and her broken ankle notwithstanding, she shrugged off the pro-Obama bias attack and went about her business of doing the best job that she or anyone else could do as a debate moderator. That made the pro-Obama knock against her and the insidious method behind it so much silliness.