Politico: Palin falls short - nonspecific, generic. Biden was crisper with dose of realism.

[jefferson_dem]

If you saw media whore Mike Allen on with Tweety yesterday before the debate, you saw someone who was clearly rooting for Palin. Reading this, he was a bit disappointed with her performance last night.

Palin meets expectations but still falls short
By: John F. Harris and Mike Allen
October 3, 2008 06:38 AM EST

ST. LOUIS — Millions of Americans were watching Thursday night’s vice-presidential debate waiting for a demolition derby moment — another crash by GOP running mate Sarah Palin, another serving of raw material for the writers at "Saturday Night Live."

By that standard, she got out alive, though there were white-knuckle moments along the way: questions that were answered with painfully obvious talking points that betrayed scant knowledge of the issue at hand, and sometimes little relevance to the question that had been asked.

But recent days have given John McCain’s team little reason to suppose that not-that-bad is good enough. The Republican ticket’s sliding polls and narrowing electoral map gave it a different imperative in her showdown against Joe Biden. That was to alter the trajectory of the race in a way reminiscent of how Palin first enlivened Republicans—it seems long ago now—when she joined the ticket in late August.

Absent new polling, there is little reason to think she cleared that bar in St. Louis.

To the contrary, it is hard to count any objective measures by which Biden did not clearly win the encounter. She looked like she was trying to get people to take her seriously. He looked like he was running for vice president. His answers were more responsive to the questions, far more detailed and less rhetorical.

On at least ten occasions, Palin gave answers that were nonspecific, completely generic, pivoted away from the question at hand, or simply ignored it: on global warming, an Iraq exit strategy, Iran and Pakistan, Iranian diplomacy, Israel-Palestine (and a follow-up), the nuclear trigger, interventionism, Cheney's vice presidency and her own greatest weakness.

Asked which is a greater threat, a nuclear Pakistan or a nuclear Iran, Palin seemed to be stalling, or writing a term paper, when she said: “An armed, nuclear armed especially Iran is so extremely dangerous to consider.”

Biden was crisper, with a dose of realism: “Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be very, very destabilizing. They are more than — they are not close to getting a nuclear weapon that's able to be deployed.”

Biden relentlessly and clearly delivered a specific message he had been assigned to hammer home: McCain-Palin would be four more years of Bush-Cheney. Biden mentioned President Bush more than a dozen times.

"Look, past is prologue, Gwen," he said at one point. "The issue is, how different is John McCain's policy going to be than George Bush's? I haven't heard anything yet."

By contrast, Palin was in much more of a survival mode, barely delivering on her advisers' hopes that she would be aggressive with Biden, throwing gaffes and policies back at him. For the Alaska governor, it was policy as a second language — adequate, but not enlightening.

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http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=C0A988EA-18FE-70B2-A89B56639707348F

[kayakjohnny]

1. Last line should be ' Not adequate and not enlightening.

She was canned and staged and fake. That is all.

[RichGirl]

2. I can't read that whole post...geez...so many words, but I do have an answer that might work.

Think of all the bad actresses you know, soap operas, B movies, Life Time movies, Tori Spelling....EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM COULD HAVE DONE WHAT SARAH PALIN DID LAST NIGHT. They could have spent weeks memorizing answers written by other people. When asked a question that they didn't have an answer for, they simply fill in with a canned answer or lines from speeches.

Paris Hilton has been in movies...she could have done that debate last night if she was memorizing lines and had time to rehearse. Nobody can deny that.