Palin To Give First Interview

KANSAS CITY, Missouri - Republican vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin will give her first substantive interview to ABC News later this week in Alaska, a campaign official said Sunday.

"There are going to be no ground rules," Mark Salter, senior advisor to presidential candidate John McCain, told reporters on the campaign plane.

Palin will give ABC's Charlie Gibson multiple interviews over the course of two days, Salter said.

While the details are still be sorted out, the interviews will likely be taped on Thursday and Friday, but it was not clear when the interview would be broadcast.

Palin has not held a press conference or given a substantive interview since McCain announced the surprise pick on August 29.

Journalists are clamoring to interview the first-term Alaska governor amid claims by her political opponents that she is not ready or experienced enough to serve a "heartbeat" away from the presidency.

She has come under fire for refusing to expose herself to the questions of the press, but McCain campaign manager Rick Davis defended her decision to wait.

"She is not scared to answer questions," Davis said on Fox News Sunday. "We run our campaign, not the news media. We'll do things on our timetable."

Davis said that the media had not been fair to Palin during a political storm over her selection and the revelation that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, and that the campaign had no intention of exposing her to "piranhas" in the news media.

Democratic vice presidential pick Joe Biden said Palin, a 44-year-old mother of five, would be a "formidable" opponent, but that time was running out for her to flesh out her record.

"Eventually, she's going to have to sit in front of you like I'm doing," Biden said on NBC.

"Eventually she's going to have to answer questions and not be sequestered. Eventually she's going to have to answer on the record."

Biden spokesman David Wade took a poke at Palin Sunday after reporters handed the candidate a cardboard cutout of McCain, ABC news reported.

"You realize you could've made history if you'd found a cardboard cut-out of Governor Palin," Wade told reporters.

"That's the closest she would've been to taking tough questions from the national media since she was selected."

"Then again, I guess the Republicans are continuing their recent history of keeping their vice-presidential picks in secure, undisclosed locations," he quipped, in reference to Vice President Dick Cheney's use of an "undisclosed location" after the September 11 attacks.

"Yet another way that McCain-Palin is more of the same."