If you were dying to know what Gwen Ifill was thinking when the controversy arose about her so-called Obama book and how that might have effected her ability to moderate the 2008 vice-presidential debate - now's your chance.
Ifill, the host of PBS's "Washington Week" appeared at the Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 24 to promote her new book, "The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama." The book was a focal point of controversy last fall and questions were raised as to whether Ifill could be an impartial moderator of the vice-presidential debate, even though she had a book that featured Barack Obama set to come out after the election.
In that appearance, Ifill claimed she didn't believe the book inhibited her ability to moderate that debate and pointed out her ability to overcome racism as how she dealt with the controversy - by strapping on her "blinders." She also took a couple of passive jabs at former GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin - commenting on her "thin" biography and remarking on Palin's debate performance.
In the midst of a discussion about President-elect Barack Obama's national security team, Washington Week host Gwen Ifill on Friday night's program sought confirmation for her theory that “what people are beginning to say is that this President-elect should be President now” as “people are saying why isn't Barack Obama leading the fight about the auto-makers?” 
Jeanne Cummings, a former political reporter for the Wall Street Journal who now works at the Politico, displayed an obvious double standard in her appearance on Friday night’s Washington Week show on PBS.
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Washington Post reporter and columnist David Broder, known as the “dean” of the Washington press corps, perfectly encapsulated, on Friday's Washington Week on PBS, the media establishment's more government spending is the answer to everything attitude when he acted bewildered as to how anyone could oppose a massive expansion of a federal health insurance program. When host Gwen Ifill raised how “Congress would like to double the number of children covered” by the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), Broder marveled at how “the President has threatened the veto, and everybody I've talked to in the administration this past week says take that threat seriously.” Broder equated federal spending with resolving a problem as he wondered: “I mean, who can be against providing health insurance for kids?” Talking over him, Ifill, a veteran of the New York Times and NBC News, echoed, “yeah.” Neither Ifill nor Broder noted the 
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Friday night PBS chat shows delivered a couple of slams from journalists at President Bush over his surprise trip to Baghdad early this week. After Richard Keil of Bloomberg News, who accompanied the President’s entourage, described some of the security precautions taken, Washington Week host Gwen Ifill cited “excessive security” as she derided the trip: “I wonder to what degree anybody in the White House thought maybe it might undermine our point if we have to take such excessive security precautions in order to go claim victory or whatever it was the President was trying to accomplish?" So trying to keep the President of the United States and his traveling party, including journalists, safe was “excessive”?