According to legend, the boxer Joe Louis introduced the expression, "you can run, but you can't hide." Well, he never met this year's crop of GOP candidates. Earlier this month, Politico surveyed the extreme media avoidance strategies of Sharron Angle, Ron Johnson, Rand Paul, Christine O'Donnell and other skittish Republicans in an article titled, "Year of the Missing Candidate." But now, Alaska Senate hopeful Joe Miller has reached a new low, deploying a private security firm to deflect - and even detain - journalists just doing their jobs on behalf of the electorate.
Already under the microscope for his reactionary views on the minimum wage, Social Security, unemployment benefits and Medicare, Miller last week announced he would no longer answer questions about his checkered past. But just days after declaring "we've drawn a line in the sand," he had his praetorian guard engage in what might be deemed "Beat the Press."

The editor of the Alaska Dispatch website was arrested by U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller's private security guards Sunday as the editor attempted to interview Miller at the end of a public event in an Anchorage school.
Tony Hopfinger was handcuffed by the guards and detained in a hallway at Central Middle School until Anchorage police came and told the guards to release Hopfinger.

For his part, Miller blamed an "irrational, angry and potentially violent" blogger while complaining "I've gotten used to the blog Alaska Dispatch's assault on me and my family." Of course, Joe Miller was only following in the footsteps of fellow Alaskan and "lamestream media" criticSarah Palin.
It was Palin who blazed the trail for would-be Republican officeholders by skirting the press to prevent general election voters from learning of her shocking ignorance and extremist views. Palin unapologetically summed up the strategy last month in some words of advice for Delaware Republican Senate candidate and masturbation foe Christine O'Donnell:

"She's gonna have to dismiss that, go with her gut, get out there, speak to the American people, speak through Fox News, and let the independents who are tuning into you, let them know what it is that she stands for, the principles behind her positions."

To be sure, O'Donnell was listening. Shortly thereafter, she told Fox News Sean Hannity she would be doing no more national media. (It's no surprise she later proclaimed, "I've got Sean Hannity in my back pocket.")
And as Politico's Jonathan Martin explained two weeks ago, O'Donnell has plenty of company among the Cowardly Lyins of the GOP:

With a month left until the midterm elections, there is something noticeably absent from some key statewide races: the candidates.
They're ducking public events, refusing to publicize the ones they do hold and skipping debates and national TV interviews altogether - out of fear of a gotcha moment that will come back to haunt them.
It's mostly, but not entirely, a Republican phenomenon. In some cases, a tea-party-oriented candidate has made a plain calculation that a one-day, process story about an absence from the campaign trail or a refusal to debate is less damaging than the captured-on-tape gaffe the candidate could make when facing reporters.

The Republicans have the game of media duck and cover down to a science. In Arizona, Governor Jan Brewer announced she would participate in no more debates after her embarrassing performance on September 1. In Colorado, Ken Buck went nine straight days without holding a public event. After he was bludgeoned by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow over his antipathy to the Civil Rights Act, Kentucky's Rand Paul skipped a scheduled appearance on Meet the Press and demanded reporters submit their questions in advance. (After a controversial attack ad from his Democratic opponent Jack Conway, Paul seems to have nonetheless garnered media sympathy.) In Wisconsin, front-runner Ron Johnson "has ignored requests from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to share his daily schedule." O'Donnell, too, cancelled on Meet the Press. Meanwhile in Oregon, GOP gubernatorial hopeful Chris Dudley was a no-show for a debate sponsored by the City Club of Portland. And as the New York Times lamented back in June:

There is a game in Nevada called "Where's Sharron Angle?" that the press is tired of playing.
Ms. Angle, a Nevada Senate candidate and Tea Party darling, has steadfastly refused to talk to reporters here, leading to some unusually aggressive behavior by local television stations. In a segment fit for TMZ, one intrepid reporter chased her on foot outside a restaurant this month, repeatedly asking why she had once said that "if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies." She ignored the questioner and tried to outpace him, in a video clip replayed across the state.

But while the Times claimed, "In her silence, Ms. Angle has exposed a fault line in political journalism," Republicans are united behind a strategy that is clearly working for them. Among the ranks of the GOP press dodgers, only Christine O'Donnell in Delaware seems destined for certain defeat.
Which means, for Republicans, you can run and you can hide.