Scoring the Biden/Palin Debate

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The summer before third grade, I became the oldest kid on my block to ride my bike with training wheels, a subject of increasing ridicule among my peers in Garland, Texas. My dad, attempting to solve the problem as dads are prone to do, decided the best solution was to take off the training wheels and push me down our steep driveway on my bike. Instinct would kick in. I would navigate the incline with increasing confidence, execute a deft 90 degree turn down the alley and ride through the neighborhood, removing the stain from my reputation.

Instinct did not kick in. Arms locked in terror, I was propelled straight down the driveway, across the alley and into a field, where I was separated from my bike by a utility pole's guy wire.

Sarah Palin was pushed down the driveway without training wheels Thursday night, and she did not hit a guy wire. Her performance sufficiently proved that she is not the slack-jawed bumpkin she seemed to be in the Katie Couric interview, frozen in fear at such simple questions as "What newspapers do you read?" and "What Supreme Court cases do you disagree with?" If the goal was to avoid cringe-inducing blunders and reduce calls for her removal from the ticket by right-wing critics, mission accomplished.

But if the goal of the vice presidential debate was to help your running mate win the presidency, Joe Biden did considerably more to meet that objective. All night long, as Palin kept steering questions back to her talking points and laying on the corn pone charm, Biden was engaged in a substantive debate at a crisis point in our history. As Palin ran down a checklist of objectives on her note cards -- ask to call him Joe, check! use "say it ain't so, Joe" attack line, check! -- Biden smiled past her dumber remarks to avoid the trap of looking like a bully and launched into a serious critique of the voting record and policy goals of John McCain, both of which are sharply out of sync with public opinion. Biden didn't even point out that Palin botched the name of the U.S. military officer in charge of Afghanistan, twice calling Army Gen. David McKiernan "McLellan." It was as if they were speaking at two different events airing in split-screen.

I think this was clearly the right approach for Biden, who can speak convincingly to the "kitchen table" concerns of the American public as a senator from a working-class background who never enriched himself in public office, unlike many other Democrats and Republicans of his generation. Palin didn't have a good answer on the economy aside from saying over and over that Democrats will raise your taxes and kill your jobs, a warning that probably works better on the Americans who still have jobs. She amusingly said at one point that "it's a toxic mess, really, on Main Street that's affecting Wall Street," a malaprop that accurately describes the Republican concern for protecting Wall Street with decades of deregulation.

There are times when charisma and pluck are enough to propel a politician into national office, and Palin has both in abundance, but I do not believe this is one of those times. Biden's a reassuring presence in this election, the quintessential steady hand who bolsters Barack Obama's claim to be ready to lead the nation. Biden conveys as strong a command of foreign policy as any Democratic politician in my lifetime.

I think one of the key points of the debate was the exchange on how to deal with the presence of Al Qaeda in Pakistan's border region with Afghanistan, an issue in which Obama's willingness to hit them with air strikes has been long ridiculed by McCain as a sign of his inexperience. McCain and Palin both continue to pursue this line of attack, even as the U.S. conducts air strikes in Pakistan.

Last night, Biden said this about the threat:

John continues to tell us that the central war in the front on terror is in Iraq. I promise you, if an attack comes in the homeland, it's going to come as our security services have said, it is going to come from Al Qaeda planning in the hills of Afghanistan and Pakistan. That's where they live. That's where they are. That's where it will come from. ... that's where bin Laden lives and we will go at him if we have actionable intelligence.

Palin, echoing McCain in the first debate, ignored the threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan and went back to justifying the Iraq War, our $10 billion-a-month boondoggle that overstretches our military, drains our budget and will never end in a McCain administration:

... as for who coined that central war on terror being in Iraq, it was the General Petraeus and al Qaeda, both leaders there and it's probably the only thing that they're ever going to agree on, but that it was a central war on terror is in Iraq. You don't have to believe me or John McCain on that. I would believe Petraeus and the leader of Al Qaeda.

In the first two debates, McCain and Palin have both vouched for Osama Bin Laden's judgment on where the U.S. should be directing its military response to the war on terror, giving the architect of 9/11 his props. If Bin Laden had a debate watching party at his cave, you have to think that this shout-out prompted culturally appropriate high-fives and "you the mans!"

As folksy as she is, Sarah Palin should be familiar with the expression "Br'er Fox, please don't throw me into the briar patch."

Credit: The photo of a winning Palin Bingo card was taken by Dan Perry and is available under a Creative Commons license.

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Scoring the Biden/Palin Debate

Scoring the Biden/Palin Debate - témata

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