Aides to Senator John McCain told the Washington Post that the McCain Team did not interview Sarah Palin at length until Wednesday, the day before McCain asked her to become his running mate.

Palin herself only told McCain of her daughter’s pregnancy during that meeting Wednesday, not before.

Former White House counsel Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr. is the one who did most of the research for McCain. He was asked to find out more about Governor Tim Pawlenty on the very day McCain asked Palin to be his Vice Presidential candidate.

In the end, the race for the vp-slot was a two-people race. On the one hand there was Pawlenty, a respected governor and Republican with quite some appeal, yet not a surprising choice, on the other Palin about whom was known less, but who would energize the base and who would cause a political earthquake drawing more attention to McCain’s campaign.

Interestingly enough, while McCain talked to every candidate on his short list, knew virtually nothing about Palin for many weeks. He only met her face to face Thursday, the day she became his running mate.

When Team McCain found out Palin’s daughter was pregnant, they debated the issue hotly; would it help or hurt McCain, or neither? It was believed that “the American people would not object to a female candidate with a 17-year-old daughter who was pregnant. We believed,” an aide to McCain who interviewed the different candidates, Steve Schmidt, said, “that parents all over America would understand that life happens. The team made a recommendation to the senator that these issues were not disqualifying.”

“Throughout this deliberative process of selecting a vice president, John McCain’s political advisers each argued pro and con positions to the senator about each of the finalists for his consideration,” he said. “The senator had an opportunity to reflect on all the pro arguments for each nominee and all of the con arguments for each nominee.”

Although McCain may have encouraged debate among his advisers it becomes increasingly clear that Palin may not have been as vetted as she should have been. Perhaps, though, the McCain campaign simply believed and continues to believe that the ‘dirt’ will not hurt the McCain-Palin ticket as much as progressive activists hope.

Most fascinating about the lack of vetting, or the late vetting better, is that Palin was on the list for VP from the start. The campaign started out with 20 names, then cut it down to six, then to two and, in the end, only Palin remained. One would think that McCain would have known everything about the person remaining by the end of the process, no?