Leslie and I walked over to the Irish Pub across the street to check out the Palin/Biden debate. The tattooed barkeep grudgingly took the sports programming off the widescreen tv to the bemused looks of the local drunks and a few minutes later managed to hook up some sound for us. With a creamy mug of Boddingtons nestled in my hand I kicked back and waited for the meltdown that honestly never occurred.
I think both candidates were well coached and Palin in particular, well scripted. Biden seemed a little tight but much better at reacting extemporaneously. Palin tended not to answer questions directly and to shift topic if she felt cornered. She adroitly morphed into the intellectually challenged folksy schoolmarm persona in order to appeal to the courser constituents in the audience. With both sides fighting for the middle and my position firmly to the western side of the aisle I am probably not an objective arbiter of their success but would like to offer a few points anyway:
Sarah (Jeepers, I've only been at this for five weeks) Palin gave her self away subconsciously a few times and these instances cast I think a better light on the real person. (remember bush the uniting centrist in his campaign doggerel?) When she was asked about equal rights for same sex couples she had to swallow hard during her surprising assent. She said that her friends would not be happy with her position. I felt the weight of her religious foundation and her obvious allegiance to it. And wonder how things would play out in real life. John Roberts and Alito gave similar homage to equal rights in their confirmation hearings.
She was licking her lips and frothing a little bit during her drill, baby, drill speech. The prospect of pulling more resources out of the ground and enriching her fellow Alaskans seemed to be a heady aphrodisiac to Madame Palin.
I thought that the debate queries were generally bland and steered clear of any controversy. Why didn't Ifill ask her about her penchant for book banning and her failure to provide rape kits to Alaskan women?
Many women I talk to, even liberal women, are subconsciously defensive about Palin or the prospect of any woman being humiliated on the national stage and I think that gender politics will have a greater impact on this election than previously thought. Even from liberal women.
Did you catch her smarmy little blast at the evil "Main Stream Media". This is a tired code phrase commonly used by Right Wing Paranoids. Turn on the radio and try to find a liberal point of view. I hear this term and want to wretch...
Look up the Bradley effect. It has been proven that you must subtract 7 points from any black candidate's poll numbers because white people can't tell the truth when it comes to race. This race becomes dead even.
Palin projects a lot of personal warmth. I am sure that many red blooded Americans would like to be nestled in her bosom. This atavistic response has been known to trump a lot of better common sense through the ages.
The Maverick from Arizona has voted with George Bush 94% of the time.
McCain bet the house with Palin and needed a knockout. He didn't get it. Coupled with pulling his campaign team out of Michigan, he has to be scrambling this morning. She scares too many people with her green naivete. And I bet that under that sugar sweet veneer is one mean bitch.
Does anyone in America still believe that we can instill lasting peace in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Pakistan with anything short of the peace of the grave that comes from a megaton thermonuclear explosion?
My problems with the candidates pale when compared to my problems with you, my fellow Americans, who are afraid to read a newspaper or a book and are so easily swayed by your pastors and talk radio.
Governor Palin is a very dangerous person to have sitting a heartbeat away from an angry 71 year old man's presidency. She does not have a facile grasp of world affairs. The small town hockey mom thing will play really well at the United Nations. Maybe she could bring sloppy joes?
8 comments:
Biden let palin insult him, the debate and the American people.
How long can the Democrats be polite nice candidates before disater strikes again?
palin used the debate to lie,distort facts and mug for cameras.
Biden had a golden opportunity to corner palin and her represive politics, yet he let her change answers or worse yet avoid questions altogether. palin used the debate to campaign rather than addresss issues. She actually winked and waved at the crowd like a high school prom queen. At one point she had the audacity to lay down the palin law, ala geo.w., telling the mediator and audience that she was going debate issues her own way!
Biden could of mentioned to palin that she [and mccain] are republican's and it has been the republican administration and Congress that have put us into this massive mess of economic and social chaos, and that you can't for the sake of votes change your party's politics in the last 2 months of the campaign to sound as if you have similiar ideas as the Democrats.
Biden spent too much time being a nice guy, and let palin escape exposing what a foolish redneck housewife narcistic idiot she really is.
Gentleman Biden had his chance to debate palin but he let palin bandstand her backwards ideas and let a golden oppurtunity slip by.
Interesting read on things, Anonymous one. But if Biden had shown his fangs, you know he would have been accused of bullying the poor girl...
I think Palin has is in way over her head. She would be sexy if not for her affectations. The bottom line...I can't deal with for more years of "Nu-cu-lar"
Please Mommy, make it stop!
Blue Heron wrote: "Many women I talk to, even liberal women, are subconsciously defensive about Palin or the prospect of any woman being humiliated on the national stage... Even from liberal women."
K-B: Not this feminist! Joe Biden was correct last night when he said Dick Cheney is the most dangerous vice president this country has ever had, in response to Palin's suggestion that she appreciated Cheney's destructive interpretation of the VP's powers and that she would expand upon them. However, if McCain drags Palin into office with him, she will topple Cheney's bad-boy pillar, and if she becomes president in McCain's absence, oh ye gods! Time to build more bomb shelters. You saw what I wrote about her. Her naked ineptitudes and spiritual beliefs need to be acknowledged -- by men and women alike.
I truly appreciate your observations. It's time to stop the madness here and now and send a message to the powers backing this ragtag band of extremists. Our votes and our votes only can sent Klondike Barbie back to the moosepie she crawled out of. It is becoming evident to me that the brainwashing McCain received in North Vietnamese prison camps might have been funded in part by southern evangelists.
It has become clear to me that the oil money that backed Bush the Sequel wants into Alaska. Don't give it to them without a fight.
Keep up the good work,
Dane Cloutier
Jeepers! What a great piece! I was mesmerized by the whole thing and even rewound the post debate interactions between the various family members trying to read their lips. Personally, I am mortified by her hunting practices – chasing innocent creatures by helicopter and finally executing them once they are so exhausted they give up. That says a lot about a person’s spirit and THAT scares me.
B
For the record I don’t know that SHE actually still does that to the wolves but she helps keep the practice legal. She also wants to take Polar Bears off the endangered species list and we all know how well that species is faring. I don’t have a problem with people hunting game if they intend to feed their families – it’s the hunting for sport that angers me. I have to keep from being all consumed by human, animal and environmental rights issue because if I did not you’d be reading about me living in a giant old growth tree for months at a time or laying in wait for unsuspecting litterers at Santa Margarita park. I’m convinced some poacher hunted the huge turtle I used to see on my way to work each morning sunning himself on a rock in the creek and turned him into Sopa de Tortuga.
B
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