VP Debate

Well, it was a good night for Sarah Palin. She held her own, and though at times she seemed scripted (what politician doesn't), I thought that her composure was confident and she didn't make a lot of obvious mistakes.

Right after the debate started, Joe Biden stated that Barack Obama "warned us two years ago on the Senate floor about the subprime mortgage mess". I was curious about this and I wondered why a junior senator would go before Congress to warn about something that he and his party had made a centerpiece of their housing policy. I pulled up Google and typed in "barack obama warned about subprime mortgages". The first hit was factcheck.barackobama.com. I swear that within 30 seconds of the words leaving Biden's mouth, these guys had literally 5 paragraphs written on this site about how Palin was wrong. I watched this during the debate and with every question, there was an instant (almost prescient) rebuttal of how Palin was wrong and Obama/Biden is correct.

This smacks of school yard oneupmanship. I can hear the Obama operatives in their cyber-lair, typing away, going "Na-na na-na poo-poo... got you again!"

According to this site, there was not one shred of truth that left Palin's mouth and Biden was the oracle. I saw nothing on the site about the 'Bosniaks'... those inhabitants of Bosnia that Biden was personally responsible for saving. (Wasn't that Steve Jobs' partner at Apple? No... that was Wozniak.) There was nothing about Biden's clean coal comment and about the myriad statistics of voting records that Biden repeated.

I hate to say it, but for most people, facts don't matter. Raw, wonky facts, that is. Whether it is Palin claiming that Obama voted 94 times to raise taxes, or Biden counterclaiming that McCain voted 477 times to raise them, everyone remembers the old joke "How can you tell when a politician is lying? When his lips are moving." Everyone was waiting to see if Sarah had what it takes to go up against Biden and not embarass herself. Polls on Drudge, Fox News' Text Message Poll, etc. showed that she won the debate hands down. CBS had a different opinion (as did Keith Olberman), but that is how it goes. Frank Luntz had a roomful of undecideds hooked up to the 'dial' and probably 80% of them said that Sarah had won and many said that she had swayed them to the right.

Personally, I started getting nervous around 10:20pm when both of them really didn't have anything to say and she started wandering off into sound-bite mode, but Gwen Ifill unwittingly rescued her from that tar pit by posing another question.

IMHO, the night was Sarah's to win or to lose and I think that she won it without a doubt.

Comments

Anonymous said…
There's this neat web service called Wikipedia. Try it sometime:

Bosniaks
October 3, 2008 at 9:45 AM
The Asterisk said…
Thanks Anonymous, I stand corrected about the Bosniaks. But you have to admit it is an obscure word, but it was properly used.
October 3, 2008 at 11:12 AM
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