As you may recall, Mr. O'Reilly and Mr. Letterman didn't get along so well when they met in 2006, but this time, the two got on just fine, making small jokes at each others' expense but smiling the whole time.

Mr. O'Reilly told Mr. Letterman he admired vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, describing her as a "self-made woman" and offering an impersonation of ABC News' Charlie Gibson interviewing her about The Bush Doctrine.

In September, Rolling Stone's Jason Gay (a former Observer editor), interviewed Mr. Letterman at length and prompted the following exchange:

Today, late the party, comes The New York Times' William Kristol, a writer who never met a cliché he didn't like. (In January, The Atlantic's James Fallows noted "the breathtaking banality of expression" in Mr. Kristlol's column.)

Here's what Mr. Kristol writes of Ms. Palin's ascendency (after his two Times' colleagues Jim Rutenberg and Alessandra Stanley made the same reference last week):

Likening Ms. Palin to a graduate student made Mr. Kristol a lot kinder to to the candidate: Slate's Jack Shafer compared her to a remedial social studies student.

Mr. Gibson was just a few short minutes into his high-stakes interview with Sarah Palin, and he was already hitting his stride. He gazed toward the vice presidential candidate through a pair of gravitas-amplifying reading glasses and waited for the answer. He did not smile.

About a week earlier, in a clip heard round the political world, CNN's Campbell Brown had asked McCain campaign spokesperon Tucker Bounds a similar question, sending the surrogate into a frenzy of petulant defensiveness, and later inspiring the campaign to cancel a subsequent CNN interview as payback for the audacity of questioning Ms. Palin's credentials.

But this time there was no shield of surrogates to take umbrage at the question. The flack field had been lowered. Ms. Palin would have to answer the questions on her own.

She responded, in part, by touting her time as chairman of the Alaskan Oil and Gas Conservation Commission overseeing the oil and gas development in a state, which she noted, produces nearly 20 percent of America's domestic energy supply.

"National security is a whole lot more than energy," said Mr. Gibson, cutting to the point.

And then: "Have you ever traveled outside the country prior to your trip to Kuwait and Germany last year?"

And later: "Have you ever met a foreign head of state?"

(The short answer: no).

Thanks to ABC's multi-platform, multi-show rollout of the Gibson-Palin tapes, we won't have a full picture of how Ms. Palin fared in her meet-the-press moment until late Friday night. But one thing was certain just a few short minutes into the first interview on Thursday night's "World News with Charles Gibson"--ABC News had drafted a savvy game plan for day one, and Mr. Gibson was following the strategy to a tee.

Going into the interview, there were risks on all sides. Ask hard questions on the wrong subjects in the wrong tone, and Mr. Gibson could come across looking preening and patriarchal, condescending and self-serving. Ask soft questions on the wrong subjects in the wrong tone, and he could come across as a weak-kneed patsy for the powerful, playing patty-cake on demand in return for his access to Palin.

But somewhere along the way, Mr. Gibson and his prep team made a smart calculation: on the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, stick to dead serious questions on topics of dead seriousness. "On this day, when national security is on everyone's mind, we wanted to talk about her view of the world," said Mr. Gibson at the outset.

The topics he then proceeded to ask Ms. Palin about—the war in Iraq, diplomacy in the middle east, military operations on the Afghan-Pakistani border—played well to his strength as a journalist. He was sobriety in a blazer, and on day one (to borrow a talking point from Ms. Palin) he did not blink.

Heading into day two, Mr. Gibson will now face a much trickier task: how to question Ms. Palin on her personal life without making the questions seem way too personal?

Everybody knows!

Herein, a sampling of what other journalists would like Mr. Gibson to ask Ms. Palin.

Jack Shafer of Slate has 10 questions, including, "How are you like Hillary Clinton?"

Over at Foreign Policy, Rebecca Frankel has 20 questions, including "What is your preferred plan for peace between Israel and Palestine? A two state solution? What about Jerusalem?"

Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici: "You're on record as favoring abstinence-only sex education. Has your teenage daughter's pregnancy caused you to reconsider that stance?"

In the meantime, The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne writes that "Gibson simply cannot let Palin skate by with her canned answers on issues. What we need to know is if she has any answers beyond the ones she has learned to 'repeat back.' I don't envy Gibson his task. But this will be a failed interview if it is long on fuzzy questions about family life and short on the questions that tell us what we need to know as citizens and voters about what kind of president Palin would be."

From the Anchorage Daily News' list of questions: "In spring of 2004, the Daily News reported that you cited family considerations in deciding not to try for the U.S. Senate: 'How could I be the team mom if I was a U.S. senator?' What was different this time as you decided to run for vice president?"

Katharine Zaleski of the Huffington Post would like to know: "With this ‘Maverick' slogan, you and John McCain appear to be trying to distance yourselves from President Bush and the Republican Party. What is it then that you dislike most about President Bush's administration? What would you change?"

And finally Jossip has "10 questions that won't be asked during the Gibson/Palin Interview," including, "Which animal-in-lipstick analogy do you most relate to, and why?"

His follow-up is more intricate.

The ABC newsman, who scored the first of what will surely be scant few major media sit-downs with John McCain’s running mate, could very easily do what a mischievous Boston television reporter did to George W. Bush in 1999 and spring a pop quiz on the unseasoned politician, measuring her knowledge (or lack thereof) of some elementary facts about global hotspots.

There’s no shortage of possible questions that could be asked, and while the ethics and relevancy of playing gotcha would be debated endlessly after the fact, the sight of Mrs. Palin flailing to answer such a basic question—or even providing an incorrect response—would instantly and powerfully drive home to millions of voters the Democrats’ contention that a person who has been governor of Alaska for 20 months (and, before that, mayor of a town with fewer people than the average Arena Football League game attracts) is frighteningly ill-prepared to assume the presidency of the United States.

But this—almost certainly—is not how it will go when Mr. Gibson interviews Mrs. Palin, nor is it how it will go if and when Mrs. Palin, acting under the strict supervision of Mr. McCain’s brain trust, consents to any similar sessions before Election Day.

From the instant Mr. McCain tapped her, his campaign leadership has schemed, with remarkable effectiveness, to minimize the obvious threat posed by Mrs. Palin’s inexperience—and, more specifically, how the media portrayed that inexperience. The road to her looming interview with Mr. Gibson is a perfect example of how deftly they’ve handled this challenge.—Mrs. Palin’s selection was announced on August 29 in Dayton, whence she proceeded almost directly into what Rick Warren might call “a cone of silence” as a rash of potentially harmful revelations—many policy-oriented, a few personal—emerged. Reports of her voracious appetite for federal earmarks and past support for the notorious “Bridge to Nowhere,” ties to the equally notorious Ted Stevens and possibly even the banning of books from public libraries exploded, but Mrs. Palin stayed quiet.

Meanwhile, an army of Republican surrogates, led by Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, aggressively hawked a victimization narrative, invoking charges of sexism, conflating the legitimate policy questions about Mrs. Palin with illegitimate personal accusations made by a blogger, and accusing the press of being “on a mission to destroy” the Republican V.P. candidate.—Fomenting this hysteria proved invaluable. It rallied the previously apathetic Republican base against its old foe, “the liberal media,” and distracted from the revelations about Mrs. Palin. (Most news outlets covered the McCain campaign’s charges of unfairness more intensely than, for instance, her reliance as mayor on the earmarks she now claims to revile.) But most importantly, it built suspense for Mrs. Palin’s carefully scripted, and tightly managed re-emergence at the Republican convention, where she masterfully read from a teleprompter and ad-libbed a few lines—skills she honed as a television sports anchor early in her career—in a command performance that surely dazzled many of the nearly 40 million Americans who tuned in expecting, based on all of the media noise they’d heard, a far shakier presentation.

That convention speech achieved two important things for the Republican campaign. First, it validated—in the eyes of many voters, and not nearly all of them Republicans—the G.O.P.’s charges of media bias. Why on earth, many casual viewers surely wondered, would the press be making so much noise about such a poised, confident and impressive woman? Not surprisingly, a poll released this Monday found that by a 54-10 percent margin, voters believe the press has been harder on Mrs. Palin than on her opponents.

This, in turn, bought the McCain campaign time and latitude in scheduling interviews for Mrs. Palin, which they used to set up this week’s relatively risk-free encounter with Mr. Gibson. Officially, no question is off-limits. But Mr. Gibson, more so than most major television personalities, has shown little interest in pursuing questions about Mrs. Palin aggressively. And the interview will be taped sporadically over two days. Surely, he won’t be playing hardball in the early sessions.

The result is close to a no-lose situation for the McCain campaign. In the unlikely event that Mr. Gibson pulls a pop-quiz surprise, they will rush to portray the interview as a hit-job—perhaps even equipping Mrs. Palin with a pithy retort ahead of time. Not everyone will buy it, but the G.O.P.’s handling of these past two weeks has won Mrs. Palin more of a cushion than anyone would have imagined when she was picked.

But most likely, Mr. Gibson will be deferential and Mrs. Palin will come off quite well. Then the public will be even less inclined to pay much attention to the media’s hectoring for more face time with the candidate and the McCain campaign will be able to be even more sparing in making her available.

Think they can’t keep this up through November? Think again.

ABC News has since confirmed the news. No details yet about when the interview will take place or when it will air. Although, according to the AP, the interview will be conducted in Ms. Palin's home state of Alaska.

More from ABC News' press release: