Jason Zengerle offered himself up as a guinea pig to understand how the vetting process works:
When I told Evan Bayh that the guy who vetted Palin was vetting me, he replied with a smirk, "I'm not sure that'd be the place I'd go to for a strenuous vet." And yet [Ted] Frank insists that the Palin vet was exhaustive, even considering the unhelpful circumstances. Working under terrible time pressure, as well as constraints imposed by the McCain campaign's secrecy concerns—to avoid tipping off anyone that Palin was under consideration, the vetters didn't interview anyone outside of her staff about her—Frank submitted a forty-five-page report cataloging almost everything that would eventually dog her on the campaign trail.
Todd Palin's DUI arrest (which she revealed on the questionnaire), her teenage daughter Bristol's pregnancy (which she confided during a three-hour phone interview with Culvahouse, Frank, and a third vetter), and Troopergate (which Frank pieced together through public documents and conversations with Palin's private attorney) were all uncovered by the vet. The only thing the report missed was Todd's membership in the Alaska Independence Party.
"We had things in there that never came out," Frank tells me. "We had things that Palin didn't even know about." Still, Frank admits he saw the same upside in Palin that McCain's political team did. "I wasn't sick to my stomach about her," he says, getting in a dig at the portrayal of him on HBO. After all, it was Frank's vetting report that his boss, Culvahouse, was largely relying upon when he offered up to McCain his assessment of Palin's potential as a running mate: "High risk, high reward."
The Dish 