I don't know who won the debate, or at least I don't know how the press is going to play it and how that is going to affect the eventual common wisdom (Biden did win all of the post-debate pols, but so did Al Gore after the first debate in 2000. It wasn't until after the press and SNL got through with him that he"lost"). But I do know a couple of things.
First, that cutesy "I am just a regular joe six pack look at me wink at you!" nonsense Palin reveled in was a real turn off for me. And it infuriated my wife. She said she was reminded her of every woman she had ever met who tried to impress the men around her with her boobs instead of her brain. If the little dial things at the bottom of CNN's screen were any indication, my wife was not alone. Time and time again, the women's line plunged when Palin went into her "little ol' me?" routine.
Second, I really think Palin is a bad person.
I know, I know, I don't know the women, how could I? But she entered a national media campaign knowing that her teenage daughter was pregnant and knowing that said teenager daughter would inevitably get the tabloid treatment. Then she used her pregnant daughter and her boyfriend as political props leading up to the campaign. It left a very bad taste in my mouth. But last night was just atrocious. It was bad enough that she implied that only she among the people on the stage could understand the struggles of parenthood. But happened next was worse. When a visibly emotional Biden reminded her that he had lost his wife and very nearly lost his two very young sons, he teared up for a moment and had to fight to bring himself back under control. It was a raw, honest look at the horror Biden and gone through. Biden has lived every parent worse nightmare and I doubt there is a parent in the world whose heart didn't break a little bit for him. Except, apparently, Sarah Palin's.
She said nothing humane to Biden after that moment, She didn't offer condolences for his loss. She didn't express sympathy for his pain. She didn't mention the admiration most parents would have for how well he raised his sons under difficult circumstances. She didn't even really pause before she gave her answer. Her very next words were "People aren't looking for more of the same. They are looking for change. And John McCain has been the consummate maverick in the Senate over all these years." It was a disgusting, inhuman response, fit for a robot but not a parent. It was performance worthy of contempt.
All of that is subjective, of course, but it also highlights the substantive difference between the two. Sarah Palin was so desperate to stick to her talking points that she couldn't respond as a real person to a very genuine and very human moment. She was like that the entire night. She hardly ever answered the questions that were asked of her. If she did not have a talking point ready at hand for the question she would pivot back to one (usually, for some odd reason, 'energy') whether or not it had anything to do with the question at hand. All politicians do this to some extent, of course. They want to fit the debate questions into the over-arching theme of their campaign. But I cannot remember the last time I saw a politician do nothing but spout talking points with such an open disregard for the content of the question. Usually a politician will address the point of the question and then use that answer to pivot iot the areas they want to talk about (Biden's answer about what would have to be sacrificed in the face of the economic bailout was a good example of this). But Sarah Palin very often couldn't be bothered to even pretend that she was answering the question. She just barreled past the question, the context of the question and the reasonable expectation that she spend at least a second or two on the matter at hand and dove right into the talking points. At one point she even bragged about her flat refusal to answer the given question, saying "And I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear". She was a broken robot, unable to do anything other than repeat the same stock phrases over and over again.
Biden, on the other hand, answered the questions. He engaged with the details, he reacted to Palin's answers and Iful's follow ups. Yes, he tried to weave the questions into the larger Obama-Biden story, but he did so by demonstrating how the questions lead to the conclusions that he and Obama had come to. Unlike Palin, you got the sense that Biden was engaged and thinking, not just reaching for the next talking point to spew. And that is why Biden won the debate, at least in my mind; He sounded like an adult ready for the difficult years ahead. Palin sounded like a parody of a beauty contest pagent, determined to slip that "world peace" answer in somewhere, dammit.
I've had enough of the White House being run by parodies of grown ups. It time to let the adults back in, and there was only one adult up on that stage yesterday.