Count me among the many who just don’t see ABC’s Charlie Gibson asking Sarah Palin any truly hard-hitting questions or holding her to account on the many contradictions in her record (most notably her repeated claim on the trail that she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere, when in fact she did just the opposite).  For one thing, the interview is not airing on Nightline or World News Tonight or even Good Morning America, but on 20/20, perhaps televisions most shameless news-through-a-soft-focus-lens program.  Why not just air it on Entertainment Tonight?

For another thing, I’m absolutely convinced that the McCain campaign– as tightly as they’ve controlled access to Sarah Palin thus far– would not allow her first post-convention interview to be anything she couldn’t handle.  I’m guesing they shopped around the coveted first Sarah Palin interview to various networks, but with preconditions attached.

Sure, you can have the first Sarah Palin interview, and the enormous ratings it will generate.  But you have to promise not to ask about this topic, not to grill her on that topic, and, oh, you have to give us the questions to review in advance.

I fully expect to see a confident, apparently competent, and still largely scripted Sarah Palin Friday night.  I fully expect at least half the questions to focus on her family life (but only the good parts like her kids, not the bad parts like Troopergate).  And I fully expect to learn nothing I didn’t already know.

She’ll no doubt be impressive, because the McCain campaign is simply too smart to chance that her first interview would go any other way.  They’ve been smart thus far to keep her in a bubble, while America– or at least the red parts of it– fall deeper and deeper in love with a woman who Roger Ebert brilliantly dubbed The American Idol candidate.  That way, when the bubble pops– which it eventually will when at some point she forgets her talking points and tries unsuccessfully to fake her way through some fundamental fact of the economy or foreign policy– enough people will already be too deep into their devotion for her to care.

UPDATE: Obviously, I’m either a bit rusty or an idiot.  The number of factual inaccuracies in this post are too numerous to count, with the most obviously egregious error being that the Palin interview is in fact airing on both World News Tonight and Nightline, with 20/20 merely airing the third part of the interview as well as a bit of discussion.  This doesn’t change the fact that 20/20 is the worst news program on network television, and John Stossel is a jerk (just thought I’d throw that in there).  Oh, and judging from the first part of the interview, Palin obviously did not get the questions in advance.