Joe Biden/Sarah Palin Debate in Review, Part Deux

Image from Asylum

Debates are odd these days, even without throwing Sarah Palin into the mix. Gwen Ifill wasn't "Awfill," but she was a sub-par moderator. I remember when the 90 second/30 second rule was strict, and if you didn't answer the moderator's question, you got asked it again.

The news tomorrow will likely be filled with at least half-hearted praise for Sarah Palin, for not falling on her face. But upon review of some of the clips, and having watched and read some varied reactions to the debate, a few things do jump out at you. For instance, Palin may not have had a "moose in the headlights" moment, but neither did she have the knock-out performance that FreeRepublic.com and Pat Buchanan are gushing about.

Most of the time, she didn't answer the questions posed, and just transitioned to what she was prepared to answer. And the preperation was obvious. I know some people might find this observation sexist, but she was giving beauty pageant answers here. I recognize it, because I remember my sister preparing for questions for beauty pagents when she was a kid. She was in "little miss" pageants, mind you, but the tactic is the same. You throw extra words and phrases in, and give yourself time to pull the answer out of your head (or other part of your anatomy).

At times--especially toward the end--Palin's responses came out like word salad, with no coherence whatsoever. But she puts in enough "main streets" and "the American peoples" and especially "alsos" to make it sound like she said something. And she answered a question about her Achilles heel by talking about her strengths.

Joe Biden for his part was boring, at least in the first half. But that's what debates usually are. Remember? Did anybody think the Lloyd Bentson-Dan Quayle debate was particularly scintillating (outside of a couple of soundbites)? But Biden was operating in a completely different world from Palin. He was debating the issues, and policy, things he obviously could rattle off with little to no preparation. Unfortunately for Joe, he's prone to use numbers in his responses, which bore Americans, and have a tendency to be remembered wrong, leading to "gotcha" fact-checking later.

This will shake out in the next few days as the fact-checking and word parsing becomes more set in stone. Maybe someone will notice that Palin's answers weren't very far removed from her Katie Couric interviews after all. They'll probably find that Biden had some of his facts jumbled, but was basically right. And they find that Palin looked good, but was basically wrong. Just a prediction.

My favorite line in the post-debate commentary was Rachel Maddow saying to Pat Buchanan (paraphrasing): "So you'd rather have 'entertaining but wrong' than 'boring but right?'"

One final observation, I did notice one thing that Palin has with John McCain: they both wink. But Palin does it intentionally.