Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden met with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili on Friday but didn’t let reporters in as the pair posed for photographers at the beginning of the session.
The decision to allow only photographers, and no reporters, into the meeting briefly at its start recalled a similar move by Biden’s Republican counterpart, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, earlier this week. Some of the news media that cover Palin’s vice presidential campaign protested and got the restriction dropped.
Phil Walzak, a spokesman for Democrat Barack Obama’s campaign, said the Biden-Saakashvili meeting was a private session between the senator and a head of state. He said they would likely issue a statement after the meeting but they won’t take questions from reporters.
The GOP campaign, applying more restrictive rules on access than even President Bush uses in the White House, banned reporters from the start of her meetings with with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe in New York this week, so as not to risk a question being asked of Palin. Republican John McCain’s presidential campaign had shielded the first-term Alaska governor for weeks from spontaneous questions from voters and reporters.
McCain aides relented after news organizations objected and CNN, which was supplying TV footage to a variety of networks, decided to pull its TV crew from Palin’s meeting with Karzai.