A Few Musings on the Debate
Biden clearly lost for one reason tonight…he couldn’t be Biden. Like him or not, Biden has taken multiple positions that are now at odds with his running mate. During the primaries he said Obama wasn’t ready to lead, and mocked him for believing violence would go down if we simply left. He can’t do that anymore. And since Barack is always bringing it up, it’s not like Biden can duck the issue. So he’s got to do this weird sort of contortion act, where he completely stops being Joe Biden to be an Obama sycophant. It doesn’t work. He seems uncomfortable in the role, and it seems impossible to pull off for Biden, who does seem (to me) to be a man of principles. So he’s now trying to sell these beliefs that he doesn’t share and doesn’t buy himself. It creates a lot of openings to hammer him, and Palin did just that…all night. Biden got caught in lie after lie after lie, and Palin just laid into him.
Some of his bigger fibs were:
“Since we’re now bringing the troops home, Obama was rigt all along when he demanded we bring the troops home. McCain favors keeping them there indefinately!” In reality, McCain’s plan is what’s bringing them home. The surge has been such a great success that the country is being pacified. Biden would show time and time again that he was willing to ignore this.
In an attempt to pin blame on Republicans, Biden claimed that Obama made a speech about Fannie and Freddie two years ago. This may be true…Obama gives a lot of completely worthless speeches that offer no details or ideas. However, one speech doesn’t negate the constant warnings of Bush and McCain. And it doesn’t take away the shame of Democrats like Dodd and Frank.
In one of the more ridiculous claims of the night, he said the economy had to be a failure because “people in his home town knew it. You could go to the supermarket and ask the employees. They knew.” Apparently, these people know Bush made their lives bad. But most people report optimism about their situation. And most people don’t watch the news enough to know what the President’s economic policies are (let alone foreign ones). If it wasn’t a dud of an attack before, Biden then claimed we never had worse fiscal policies! Never? Not during the Great Depression? Not during the Great Society? Woodrow Wilson’s were good? Jimmy Cart’s double digit unemployment-a-thon wasn’t bad? Puhleease.
And Palin jabbing him off balance with his own quotes and facts weren’t enough. She had two doozies that gave this to her. The first was when she reduced Joe to a stuttering mess, then silence, by contradicting his lie that the Afghanistan general said a surge would fail there. This was followed with the beautiful one lines “He did it again. He can’t get off Bush. For people who are supposedly about change, you can’t get off the past. You’re hung up on him.” Both were knockout blows.
BUT…While Palin came off as likable yet tough, and seemed far more comfortable and knowledgable than in other interviews…the mantra of strict conservative was completely shattered, as she followed McCain’s lead and started in with the populist rhetoric. OF COURSE, the oil companies are greedy! When Biden bemoaned that she wouldn’t “support a windfall profits tax like she did in Alaska”, she answered that she would. She also affirmed McCain’s cap and trade program and hyped her credentials as “the first governor to have a global warming committee”. Instead of simply being a lukewarm moderate conservative, as she at first appeared to be…she now appears to be a populist maverick in the mold of McCain. Her performance tonight would’ve been more than enough to convince me not to vote for them…had they not been running against Obama. Her charge that everything could be solved with MORE bipartisanship made me cringe. Our worst solutions over the past 8 years were our most friendly bipartisan ones: McCain/Feingold, the Medicare Act, the DREAM Act, and this recent bailout. Much like Bush and McCain, Palin doesn’t seem to get that politics is SUPPOSED to be confrontational and adversarial, not nice and friendly and lovey dovey. Giving such answers makes her sound more like Obama than Reagan.
And if the aftershow they whined about conservative coverage of Ifill as unfair, “just because of her book”. While Ifill did a decent job, let’s not pretend that having a moderator who just wrote a gleaming book about Obama shouldn’t raise eyebrows as to her objectivity. If it had been Fredderoso or Corsi, the left would’ve went wild.
And contrary to the new memo that “Palin just read off a script, even if it didn’t match the question”, Palin seemed remarkably on topic. She responded to criticism, and hammered Biden. If anyone sounded on script, it was Biden, who, everytime he was criticized, sputtered incoherently, then went right back to what he was saying.
