SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO…..ON THE DEBATES (PART 1)
Here’s Part 1 in a roundup of articles regarding the debates. Whether she won or not is moot. I do not believe many minds have been changed. I could be dead wrong but in the next few days I doubt anyone will see any radical change in the poll numbers even though many on the right were hoping that she’d be the “Hail Mary” to give McCain a boost. McCain, I feel is his own worst enemy, refusing to engage “the enemy” and fire with both barrels when it is required. He claims to be taking “the high road” but when you have to eradicate the vermin living in the sewer, you must get into the sewer with them. Dangling traps from the “high ground” will not do it.
Anyway, I gave up on the debate early on although to read some commentary she DID do better as it progressed.
Jacob Laskin at FrontPage thinks she won.
Time and again in their Thursday night debate, Palin not only stood her ground against Biden but, on issue after issue, outperformed her Democratic counterpart. This political pit-bull, it turns out, has bark and bite.
It didn’t hurt Palin that Biden seemed determined to rehearse the more dubious charges of the Obama campaign. Several times, Biden suggested that John McCain had pushed for a special tax break for oil companies like Exxon Mobil at the expense of tax relief for the middle class, a charge that first aired in an Obama TV ad earlier this summer. At the time, the non-partisan website PoltiFact.com, maintained by the St. Petersburg Times, demonstrated that it was a serious distortion of McCain’s support for a broad reduction in corporate taxes.
Palin went one better. Not only did she identify by name Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, but she went on to point out, accurately, that Obama himself had voted for the 2005 energy bill that granted tax breaks to oil companies, and contrasted it with her own much-publicized battles with oil companies in Alaska. (Palin was too nice to mention that Obama’s crusading against Exxon hasn’t prevented him from pocketing more than $30,000 from Exxon-Mobil employees.) A minor issue in the context of the wider debate, it nonetheless established straightaway that Palin not only understood the details of policy – something that her recent televised flops had given cause to doubt – but would not be bullied on politics.
Peggy Noonnan said “she killed.”
She killed. She had him at “Nice to meet you. Hey, can I call you Joe?” She was the star. He was the second male lead, the good-natured best friend of the leading man. She was not petrified but peppy.
The whole debate was about Sarah Palin. She is not a person of thought but of action. Interviews are about thinking, about reflecting, marshaling data and integrating it into an answer. Debates are more active, more propelled—they are thrust and parry. They are for campaigners. She is a campaigner. Her syntax did not hold, but her magnetism did. At one point she literally winked at the nation.
As far as Mrs. Palin was concerned, Gwen Ifill was not there, and Joe Biden was not there. Sarah and the camera were there. This was classic “talk over the heads of the media straight to the people,” and it is a long time since I’ve seen it done so well, though so transparently. There were moments when she seemed to be doing an infomercial pitch for charm in politics. But it was an effective infomercial.
Joe Biden seems to have walked in thinking that she was an idiot and that he only had to patiently wait for this fact to reveal itself. This was a miscalculation. He showed great forbearance. Too much forbearance. She said of his intentions on Iraq, “Your plan is a white flag of surrender.” This deserved an indignant response, or at least a small bop on the head, from Mr. Biden, who has been for five years righter on Iraq than the Republican administration. He was instead mild.
Of course, the AP leads with, “In the Contest of Low Expectations, Palin Won”
While both vice presidential candidates achieved their goals Thursday night, the stakes were much higher and the bar was much lower for Sarah Palin. So, in the contest of low expectations, Palin won.
Joe Biden’s task was to attack. Palin’s was to attack, connect and stick to her folksy script.
If nothing else, the first-term Alaska governor got past her raft of nonsensical and meandering answers in evening news interviews with Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson, the spoofs by “Saturday Night Live” and the mockery of late-night comics.
From her first words, a confident Palin sought to connect with voters whose faith in her qualifications has waned. She sprinkled down-home phrases throughout her answers — “bless their hearts” and “darn right.” Americans weren’t just people they were “Joe Six-Pack” and “Hockey Moms.” And who needs polls, she suggested, when there are youth soccer games with parents on the sidelines?
“I’ll betcha you’re going to hear some fear in that parent’s voice,” Palin said.
She defended Republican presidential nominee John McCain from Biden’s litany of criticisms, and took Biden to task over both his record and that of Democratic nominee Barack Obama.
And yet, it wasn’t a perfect performance.
And yet, I wonder why the AP didn’t bother to also say, “it wasn’t a perfect performance” when it came to discussing Biden’s performance? HMMMMM?!?!?!?!
Time after time they pick on her for small mistakes regarding names of Generals or saying “Main Street” instead of “Wall St.”
Maybe someone ought to send the AP and the rest of the LameStream Media these outright LIES (not mispronunciations of names or confusion of Wall vs Main Streets.
Here’s one:
On the foreign policy front, Biden challenged Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin when she said Barack Obama’s pledge to meet with any foreign leaders, including Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, without precondition “goes beyond naivete and goes beyond poor judgment.”
Biden lectured Palin, “That’s just simply not true about Barack Obama. He did not say he’d sit down with Ahmadinejad.” During the YouTube Democratic primary debate last July Obama was asked if he would meet the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea without “precondition” during his first year in office.
“I would,” he replied.
And another:
During the debate Biden adamantly claimed McCain voted the same way as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama did on a vote to raise taxes on those making $42,000 a year. The legislative record shows McCain was not present in the Senate for either of those votes and is recorded as “not voting.”
All of them are here.
