Wednesday-Night

See also Sarah Palin and Joseph Biden

Don’t miss Tina Fey’s version of the debate

Dick Cheney, Role Model
(NYT Editorial) In all the talk about the vice-presidential debate, there was an issue that did not get much attention but kept nagging at us: Sarah Palin’s description of the role and the responsibilities of the office for which she is running, vice president of the United States.
In Thursday night’s debate, Ms. Palin was asked about the vice president’s role in government. She said she agreed with Dick Cheney that “we have a lot of flexibility in there” under the Constitution. And she declared that she was “thankful that the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president also, if that vice president so chose to exert it.” (Editor & Publisher) On Friday, I put up a column at E&P on how most of the mainstream pundits blew it again in sizing up the Palin-Biden debate — claiming that Palin had held her own or even beat Biden and would do the GOP ticket a world of good. Of course, all the polls afterward showed that vast majorities, in fact, said Biden had won, and the GOP ticket immediately lost ground in surveys. (The same thing had happened after the Obama/McCain debate.) Anyway, I also took issue with those pundits who said that now, after Palin’s swell performance, poor Tina Fey would lack any good material for tonight’s SNL skit. Having just seen it: wrong again (wink, wink, gosh darn, you betcha). UPDATE: Gwen Ifill (portrayed by Queen Latifiah in the skit) on Sunday accuses Palin of undermining the debate by not answering her questions. — Greg Mitchell
(The Economist)  The good news for the McCain campaign is that Mrs Palin was confident and assertive, and made no big errors. The bad news is that a mediocre performance counts as good news. But they will take what they can get at this point.
In the same vein as above, our friend Bill Copp’s comment: Listening to the pre-debate punditry was a scary experience in that it appeared that the consensus opinion for Sarah Palin, … to have a successful evening…..was that she appear to be COHERENT. For the better part of the last eight years the adult world has put up with a President who is not only incompetent but cannot properly manage his own mother tongue and here we go again. Whatever happened to the letter ‘g’ for example, why is nuclear such a tough word and just how good does “git ya” sound in a major speech. Surely it is not asking too much to have the possible Vice President of the most powerful nation in the world be a little more refined in her speech patterns, at least more refined than a cutesy truck stop waitress on anybody’s interstate.
You’re No Harry Truman, Governor
(Truthdig) Palin was a total wild card. Nothing Biden said had any impact on her. She treated him graciously, as if he were an odd but pleasant newcomer to Wasilla, having just moved there from the lower 48. He showed she was often factually wrong, but she ignored him with a smile. Finally, he was reduced to repeating his points. “Let me say it again,” he said on a couple of occasions.
Commentators on many of the networks marveled at Palin’s insistence on avoiding substantial comment on issues and on simply ignoring questions she couldn’t answer convincingly.
Palin basically stated early in the debate that this would be her strategy. She said she wasn’t necessarily going to respond to the questions of the moderator or charges from Biden, but instead, “I’m gonna talk right to the American people.” Since this was billed as a debate, not a speech, her remark came across as arrogant, and as an admission she would duck tough questions.

The Nightmare VP Debate Scenario: Biden, Beware! Post-debate Update
… watching her last night, the prospect of her becoming President still seemed pretty unsettling, I’d suspect even for conservatives. A lot of people are generally willing to roll the dice on a bumbling regular person as President. In the wake of eight unhappy years of Bush, and with the economy threatening to melt down, that is a lot less appealing right now. Whatever she did last night on the charm front, she did very little to reassure America she had the necessary gravitas or a competent grasp of the issues.
Polling results from the debate
(Foreign Policy Morning Brief) Appearing in their first and only debate Thursday evening, U.S. vice presidential candidates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin said little beyond the expected talking points.
But if Democrats were hoping that the Palin, whose recent television interviews showed the Alaska governor often struggling to answer basic questions, they would have been disappointed last night. Using folksy phrases such as “heck of a lot” and “darn right,” she stuck largely to prepared statements and adapted them to fit — or ignore altogether — what were fairly predictable questions from moderator Gwen Ifill.
Biden appeared deeply knowledgable, especially on foreign-policy issues such as Darfur. At one point, the Delaware senator appeared to tear up when alluding to his first wife’s death and being a single father. He largely avoided seeming brusque or condescending, though at times got derailed by dwelling on Senate procedure or his own record, rather than that of his running mate, Barack Obama. Neither candidate, however, made any major mistakes.
Politico’s Roger Simon thinks Palin dominated the debate. “Where was this woman during her interview with Katie Couric?” asks David Brooks in his New York Times column. “She had no problem meeting the exceptionally low expectations,” Dana Milbank quips for the Washington Post. Doubts, however, are likely to linger about her fitness for the country’s No. 2 job, and the debate seems not to have altered the basic dynamics of the race. “Averaging expectations, style and points, it was a wash,” assesses political analyst Marc Ambinder.
The Palin-Biden debate and the poverty of low expectations
(FT) …  But overall, the debate will have made little difference. That means the political focus will switch back to where it should be - Congress’s vote on the bail-out and the McCain-Obama battle. Perhaps now, the vice-presidential candidates can be allowed to recede gently into the background.
In Debate, G.O.P. Ticket Survives a Test
Gov. Sarah Palin made it through the vice-presidential debate on Thursday without doing any obvious damage to the Republican presidential ticket. By surviving her encounter with Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. and quelling some of the talk about her basic qualifications for high office, she may even have done Senator John McCain a bit of good, freeing him to focus on the other troubles shadowing his campaign.
2 October
Past Debates Show a Confident Palin, at Times Fluent but Often Vague
Perhaps her strength in debating was coming across like an average person who understood the average person’s needs and would not be expected to have detailed policy prescriptions.