There is no questioning the fact that the expectations for Sarah Palin were incredibly low coming into last night's VP debate with Joe Biden. All she had to do was avoid any of mind-numbingly incoherent responses she gave to Charles Gibson or Katie Couric and she would be able to claim victory. She came out swinging and gave a pretty impressive performance for the first 30 minutes of the debate. Her answers were still, by and large, nonsensical and uninformative, but her presence was powerful. Midway through, Biden got a grip and realized that she was so dependent on her talking points that she was going to have difficulty going off-script, so to speak. This gave him a huge opening to make attacks on McCain to which she had very little to say in response. By the end, two things were clear: Palin had exceeded the paltry expectations placed on her, and Biden had won the debate. Subsequent poll results affirm that opinion.
Some highlights:
I was shocked by the incoherent and inept responses she gave to questions regarding nuclear (or "nucular" if you are W or Palin) proliferation and education. Go back and read the transcripts of her responses. They are as bad as any of her Couric responses - just given with more confidence and pep.
Biden's response to the question about Cheney was devastating. While she stumbled around trying to articulate the inherent "flexibility" that's apparently built in to the office of the vice president, Biden leveled a remarkable attack on Cheney, calling him "dangerous" and claiming that he had abused his office to the detriment of the US.
What to do?
1 year ago
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