Joe Biden--Inspired Veep Pick

[babylonsister]

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_stump/archive/2008/10/02/joe-biden-inspired-veep-pick.aspx

Joe Biden--Inspired Veep Pick


No question Palin helped herself tonight, but that's only because she had so far to climb. If you're grading on anything other than a massive curve, Biden wins hands down.

The beauty of Biden is that he can go blow for blow with Palin on ordinary Joe-ness, then actually know what he's talking about when he answers questions. Palin talks about the mean streets of Wasilla, Biden talks about the mean streets of Scranton. Palin talks about her son in Iraq, Biden talks about his son in Iraq. Palin talks about being the mother of a child with special needs, Biden talks about being a widower with two badly injured boys. Every time you thought she might claim an emotional advantage, Biden evened the emotional score.

But, man, ask the woman to grapple with a substantive question and you worry she's going to hurt herself.

snip//

I also thought Biden was brilliant at poking through Palin's tax blather, which was more or less the only thing she had to say about economics:

Look, all you have to do is go down Union Street with me in Wilmington or go to Katie's Restaurant or walk into Home Depot with me where I spend a lot of time and you ask anybody in there whether or not the economic and foreign policy of this administration has made them better off in the last eight years. And then ask them whether there's a single major initiative that John McCain differs with the president on. On taxes, on Iraq, on Afghanistan, on the whole question of how to help education, on the dealing with health care.

Just terrific stuff. It's a simple choice: Change versus more of the same. Everything else is noise.

My completely impressionistic take on Palin's performance tonight is that it mirrored her campaign performance so far (if not quite as dramatically): When Palin started off, you thought, "Wow, she seems so fresh--so human and easy to relate to. How can we compete with that?" Then, as the debate wore on, you thought, "Hmm, okay, she still seems human, but not quite what I'm looking for in a vice president." And, by the end, as the vacuous answers piled up, it was more like, "Good God, keep this woman away from the Oval Office." Which is the story of the last month, too.

Palin just isn't a candidate who wears well over any extended period of time, whether it's a 90-minute debate or a 60-day campaign. The reason is that she only has one mode: human and relateable. That's fine when the topic is middle-class pain. But there are whole classes of issues--foreign policy chief among them--where human and relateable aren't what you're looking for, even if you're an uninformed voter.

--Noam Scheiber

[riona]

1. Agreed.

"Relating", "one of us", "folksy", "I'm a mom," may make some voters comfortable with choosing her, but no matter how you look at it, a potential president should NOT be just average. If the electorate doesn't know that after the past several years, they had better remove the rose-colored glasses. We're losing our "shining star" status.

[Muttocracy]

2. she really does wear out quickly. nt