Post-Debate Reaction and Analysis of VP Debate
Here is a quick roundup of Post-Debate Reaction and Analysis of last night’s VP Debate. What did you think? Let me know in comments.
[If you missed the debate, you can see it in full here.]
Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow do a post-debate analysis…
Last Night CNN had an interesting post-debate analysis…
Carl Bernstein on a post analysis of debate…
Fox News thought Sarah Palin did great. Articulate, even…
Morning Joe on MSNBC has a quick analysis of last night’s debate…
Say It Ain’t So Joe????????
What the bloggers thought…
Pamela from Pam’s Coffee Conversation found a great fact-checking video…
They started off amicably enough. “Can I call you Joe?” were Sarah Palin’s first words. Similarly, “Pleasure to be with you, to meet you,” Joe Biden began. Joe called her “Governor Palin,” while Sarah called him “Senator Biden.” They kept the tone deflected away from each other by focusing on Obama/McCain and cherry-picking points to lavish praise on one another. Biden praised Palin for her support of windfall profit taxes and her support of civil unions; Palin praised Biden for once saying he would run on the ticket with John McCain and for his support of Israel. However, it wasn’t always so friendly…
From Robert Shrum at The Huffington Post…
Sarah Palin has experience being a runner-up — which will come in handy in November. Tonight she barely kept up. In advance, the commenteriat almost unanimously agreed on a false measure of this debate. Judging by “expectation” meant that pundits could conceivably award a faux victory if she was half-coherent and modestly informed after a cram session in Arizona. But voters apply an absolute standard, not a low water mark of expectations: With America facing two wars and economic disaster, Americans ask if a candidate is up to the job.
By any rational assessment, Palin wasn’t tonight — and hasn’t been any time she’s not reading a teleprompter. President Palin– the nuclear button, recession, the health care crisis, global warming (which she doesn’t believe in, as she believes in creationism) — well, it simply doesn’t compute. A part in Fargo, yes — that office in the West Wing, no.
Everybody wondered how Palin would do. At least as important, or more, was that Joe Biden did a superb job. He deftly stopped Palin from distorting Obama’s views. He won the tax cut argument– Democrats usually don’t. He won the health care argument; Palin just gave up. She wouldn’t — couldn’t — answer the questions; she wanted to talk about energy, which she’s supposed to know something about, but she even lost on that . Often she didn’t know or couldn’t say what McCain’s policy is. And on foreign policy, she must have been staring out the window when she sat down with Henry Kissinger. She “loves” Israel but can’t discuss mideast realities in one inch depth. She can’t even articulate basic conditions for the use of nuclear weapons.
Palin relied on topline phrases and had little command of facts. Why, she even memorized the name of the President of Iran. But it was mostly blah, blah, blah. At the end, the Obama-Biden ticket is far ahead on the big issues — and Palin’s a parrot repeating memorized phrases, not a plausible vice-president. Biden called her on it every time.
From FiveThirtyEight.com
As with the Obama-McCain debate last Friday, the vast majority of the insta-polls went to the Democratic ticket. Biden won the CBS poll of undecideds 46-21, and the CNN poll of debate watchers 51-36. Independents in the large MediaCurves focus group panel went for Biden about 2:1.
The internals, however, weren’t nearly as bad for Palin as the topline results. She got a jump in preparedness in the CBS poll, and the CNN found that a large majority of voters concluded that she had beaten their expectations.
Palin’s largest problem, to my eyes, is that she was tangibly nervous for most of the debate, rushing through talking points and canned jokes alike with unsually little inflection. I doubt that this will impact her favorables much — in fact, it seems likely that her favroables will improve.
From What Tami Said…
I’ve had a crazy-making fortnight with a lot of stuff going on both at work and home, so I haven’t been posting as much. I wish I had written the post that was swirling around my head over the last week, so that this morning I could look like a wise and prescient cyberpundit. I knew that Sarah Palin would perform better than her Couric and Gibson interviews would suggest. I knew Joe Biden was unlikely to make one of his trademark gaffes. I guessed that Palin would appeal to those who like bright, shiny and pretty–packaged lines and zingers and “personal connection,” not wonkiness. I thought that Biden might look a little old and dusty next to the Republican’s “breath of fresh air” candidate, but I knew that once he demonstrated his vast knowlege of foreign policy and the economy, most viewers would remember that new ain’t better if there is no “there” there. So, last night’s debate turned out just like I thought. The veep candidates’ performances likely cemented opinions on both side. Joe Biden won, but the game remains unchanged.
Michelle Malkin thinks – “Sarah Rocks”
First, I would like to see all the Sarah doubters and detractors in the Beltway/Manhattan corridor eat their words.
Eat them.
Sarah Palin is the real deal. Five weeks on the campaign trail, thrust onto the national stage, she rocked tonight’s debate.
She was warm, fresh, funny, confident, energetic, personable, relentless, and on message. She roasted Obama’s flip-flops on the surge and tea-with-dictators declarations, dinged Biden’s bash-Bush rhetoric, challenged the blame-America defeatism of the Left, and exuded the sunny optimism that energized the base in the first place.
McCain has not done many things right. But Sarah Palin proved tonight that the VP risk he took was worth it.
Also See:
- Outside The Beltway
- Black Voices
- Women Against Sarah Palin
- Crooks and Liars
- Feministing
- Right Pundits
So. That’s what the media and blogger reaction to the debate was. What was your reaction? Who won? Who lost? Who was just annoying? Let me know in comments.
