I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid
Well, Palin held her own and Biden kept a lid on it.
During a 90-minute debate in St. Louis, vice presidential candidates Sen. Joe Biden and Gov. Sarah Palin both managed to avoid any disastrous screw-ups, which was pretty much all they were expected to do Thursday night. Although both Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. Joe Biden both made some verbal stumbles — he can’t seem to pronounce his running mate’s name and she says “nucular” just like Bush — both were more eloquent than they have been.
As Palin has observed, there is no set job description for the vice president, and as we all know, the most important part of the job is the ability to take over should something tragic happen to the president. So a VP doesn’t really need to look vice presidential. He or she needs to look presidential.
As a silverback of the Senate, Biden didn’t need to work too hard to look like a leader; he needed to demonstrate he doesn’t have Tourette’s. He did so handily. Expectations for Palin were ridiculously low; she pretty much had to prove she could speak in complete sentences, maybe name a newspaper or a court case or a world leader. She didn’t demonstrate proficiency in foreign policy, but she allayed many of the worst fears.
Moderator Gwen Ifill didn’t throw any curveballs and didn’t press too hard when the candidates veered off course. After asking a plainly worded question about an important bankruptcy bill, she let Palin get away with an off-topic, BS answer and allowed Biden to escape without having to explain his unpopular vote.
Biden’s legislative record is a mile thick, so all he had to do to answer Ifill was rifle through 36 years of Senate experience for relevant answers — and keep ‘em short, which he mostly did. On several occasions he was powerfully clear, especially in a rebuttal to Palin’s charges that Obama voted 94 times to raise taxes:
The charge is absolutely not true. Barack Obama did not vote to raise taxes. The vote she’s referring to, John McCain voted the exact same way. It was a budget procedural vote. John McCain voted the same way. It did not raise taxes. Number two, using the standard that the governor uses, John McCain voted 477 times to raise taxes.
Palin, on the other hand, came to the lectern with a record that is painfully thin. She had the most to prove and her ticket had the most to lose. After a post-convention bump, Palin’s stumbling, bumbling interviews with Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson appeared to result in a precipitous decline in favorability ratings. (A Washington Post/ABC News poll released Thursday revealed that “fewer than half of voters think she understands ‘complex issues.’”)
And while Palin did lapse into some of the nonsensical blathering that unnerved viewers of the Couric interviews (“Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet, so those dangerous regimes, again, cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, period.” Um, what?), she was forceful and persuasive on predatory lending and scored a zinger on big oil when she said “It was Barack Obama who voted for that energy plan that gave those tax breaks to the oil companies that I then had to turn around.”
Biden sounded as knowledgeable as he should for all his experience, but he probably didn’t have anybody jumping off the couch with enthusiasm. When he was droning on about some obscure amendment to some vote on something or other, Joe Sixpack probably took a bathroom break. But Palin is very good at connecting with Joe Sixpack, practically flirting through the camera as she smiled and rolled her eyes while somehow turning her unwillingness to blame man for global warming into a halfway convincing promise to “clean up this planet!”
While Palin appeared to have mastered a small set of talking points and repeated them competently, Biden’s answers felt much less rehearsed — except when, after a question about health insurance, he finally got to say a line he’d clearly been waiting to deliver: “So you’re going to have to replace a $12,000 plan with a $5,000 check you just give to the insurance company. I call that the ‘Ultimate Bridge to Nowhere!’” You could hear the audience chuckling in the background.
In the past few weeks Biden has made a series of faux-pas by directly contradicting Obama’s policies on things like clean coal and the bailout, even going so far as to call one of his own campaign ads “terrible.” And that was after he exhorted a wheelchair-bound state senator to “stand up, let the people see you.” Palin worked hard to make it look like Biden and Obama disagree on a lot of issues. “Barack Obama voted against funding troops there after promising that he would not do so,” she said. “And Senator Biden, I respected you when you called him out on that.”
Biden did his best to paint McCain as a direct descendant of George W. Bush. He stared straight into the camera to deliver this little monologue:
The issue is, how different is John McCain’s policy going to be than George Bush’s? I haven’t heard anything yet. I haven’t heard how his policy is going to be different on Iran than George Bush’s. I haven’t heard how his policy is going to be different with Israel than George Bush’s. I haven’t heard how his policy in Afghanistan is going to be different than George Bush’s. I haven’t heard how his policy in Pakistan is going to be different than George Bush’s. It may be. But so far, it is the same as George Bush’s. And you know where that policy has taken us.
When it was all over, MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow described the matchup as “boring and right vs. exciting and wrong.” “While many Republicans would deny that Palin was wrong, Democrats could hardly claim that Biden was exciting.”
Lucky for them he didn’t have to be exciting. To his supporters, Barack Obama provides plenty of excitement. From a presidential candidate’s point of view, a running mate has to do only two things: help him get elected, and be prepared to take over if he’s incapacitated. McCain put all of his eggs in the “get me elected” basket, while Obama hedged his bet. This week that bet appears to be paying off.
“Palin’s Daunting Task: Stop the Bleeding.” That’s how CBS News’ Pat Conroy spelled it out on Thursday. Palin was much improved after her semester at debate camp. She proved that she could speak in complete sentences, pronounce Ahmadinejad properly and make a decent case for Israel. She showed again that she has a gift for speaking to voters in the kind of aw-shucks way that swept George Bush to the White House twice. (Remember, there were probably few people watching the debates in 2000 and 2004 who thought that Bush was smarter or more experienced than Al Gore or John Kerry, but they voted for him anyway.)
The proof is in the polling, and all eyes will be on what kind of bump, if any, Palin’s performance gives her team in the coming week. In all likelihood her performance will put a tourniquet on some of the defections to Obama.
