Sarah Palin is not ready for prime time and a month of deep immersion in foreign and domestic policy studies hasn't made a dent in that.  She is under the tutelage of top national players and still can barely keep her talking points straight, let alone extrapolate on them.  If anyone is in doubt of that take a look at her interview with Katie Couric.  This was a very tame interview, the questions were not  hard.  Katie didn't even try a gotcha, she didn't have to. 

The McCain camp is painfully aware of Palin's limitations and they are in a panic.  The VP debate is one week from today.  It appears that Palin's brain is already saturated with only a tiny fraction of what needs to be in there.  I didn't jump on the low expectations bandwagon but at this point it's clear that Sarah Palin isn't even up to the task of a fairly challenging television interview, let alone a 1 1/2 hour debate with Joe Biden, even with answer time cut down.

John McCain is off kilter right now.  He's floundering and making bad calls.  He's sinking in the polls.  But I don't think this "time out" and attempt to call off the debate is about him so much as about Sarah Palin.  McCain has been in Washington for over two decades and is experienced at debate.  Tomorrows scheduled debate will center around foreign policy, well within his comfort zone.  What he's doing right now looks very strange, desperate and weak.  I don't think he is taking all that risk just because he is flummoxed.  I think he knows that a Palin debate is a disaster waiting to happen and is making a desperate attempt to have the Presidential debate rescheduled to next Thursday to bump the Veep debate off the calendar.

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