You’ve got to love Peggy Noonan. You can always count on this former Reagan speechwriter to tell it like it is. And if you are a Democrat, you really need to read her stuff. She keeps you grounded and honest. And sometimes she even reassures you (she’s not exactly Palin’s biggest fan). Plus, she’s funny:
Sarah Palin saved John McCain again Thursday night. She is the political equivalent of cardiac paddles: Clear! Zap! We’ve got a beat!
But seriously, Noonan’s commentary on last night’s debate hits most of the nails right on the head. No matter who you support in this election, it’s hard to argue with her analysis.
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 . . .
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.
The heart of her message was a complete populist pitch. “Joe Six-Pack” and “soccer moms” should unite to fight the tormentors who forced mortgages on us. She spoke of “Main Streeters like me.” A question is at what point shiny, happy populism becomes cheerful manipulation.
Palin’s shiny, happy populism overlooks a critical shortcoming of her ticket: there is no evidence that their policies would help mainstreeters. Palin talks a great talk when there’s virtually no follow up from (filter between) the media. How does their tax policy, which gives no tax break to 100 million middle “mainstreeters” but instead targets $4 billion in tax breaks to corporate America? How is it helpful to mainstreet Americans with employer-based healthcare to lose their healthcare plan and get a $5,000 tax credit toward purchasing insurance that will surely cost double that amount out of pocket? Biden hit McCain and Palin on this point with perhaps the best zinger of the night: “So you’re going to have to place — replace a $12,000 plan with a $5,000 check you just give to the insurance company. I call that the “Ultimate Bridge to Nowhere.”
Had Joe Biden not been beaten into submission before the debate (“don’t come off too mean!”), he might have engaged Palin a bit more combatively than he did. Palin came in with that advantage, and she worked it aggressively. Still, while Palin won on appearance, Joe Biden won on substance. And this election, more than any in recent memory, demands substantive, reassuring leadership. Joe Biden spent most of the night effectively articulately the Obama – Biden ticket’s policies. When he hit back it was mostly aimed at John McCain. Near the end of the debate, after Palin had used the word “maverick” so many times it made me cringe to hear it, Biden delivered a powerful indictment against the sunny maverick McCain image Palin continually invoked:
He’s been a maverick on some issues, but he has been no maverick on the things that matter to people’s lives.
He voted four out of five times for George Bush’s budget, which put us a half a trillion dollars in debt this year and over $3 trillion in debt since he’s got there.
He has not been a maverick in providing health care for people. He has voted against — he voted including another 3.6 million children in coverage of the existing health care plan, when he voted in the United States Senate.
He’s not been a maverick when it comes to education. He has not supported tax cuts and significant changes for people being able to send their kids to college.
He’s not been a maverick on the war. He’s not been a maverick on virtually anything that genuinely affects the things that people really talk about around their kitchen table.
Biden even made up ground on Palin’s home turf- her image as just an average mom with an average family to juggle. He was proud and then vulnerable, recalling the days after his first wife and daughter died in a car crash (in which his two sons were critically injured):
But the notion that somehow, because I’m a man, I don’t know what it’s like to raise two kids alone, I don’t know what it’s like to have a child you’re not sure is going to — is going to make it — I understand.
All in all, Biden turned in a strong performance (aside from his excessive grinning at inopportune moments), perhaps stronger than we realize, given that so many of us went into this forgetting that Palin excels at debate, particularly a debate with such stringent rules on followup discussion (the sort of followup that Katie Couric was able to do in her interviews). Again, Noonan is instructive:
[Palin] 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 for those pundits who said that Palin’s goal going into this was merely to survive gaffe-free, I disagree. Her goal was to bloody up the Democratic ticket, and in doing so win points for “feistiness”. She threw some cute and some tough punches, but nothing that Biden didn’t counter. Palin reclaimed some of her dignity last night, and succeeded in slowing, but not stopping, her own campaign’s bleeding–you don’t pull out of Michigan unless you are in deeper trouble than one debate performance can fix. The Couric, Gibson and even Hannity interviews did irreparable damage to both McCain and Palin that just can’t be fixed with a wink and a cutesy “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”
Here’s some final analysis from NBC’s Political Director Chuck Todd (who has inherited Tim Russert’s white board):
Palin started strong and proved to be a folksy cliché machine, which probably came across as extremely charming. She lit up the screen at times with her smile and occasional winks.
She proved extremely adept at avoiding questions or topics she didn’t want to answer, which is the big difference in her fairly smooth performance tonight and her near-disastrous performances in those one-on-one interviews.
This debate may have a shelf life of about 24 hours, perhaps 48 hours and that’s about it.
And he’s right. If there’s no blood on the floor, the media will move right along. Next story: the House votes on that bailout-rescue package today. It’s going to be nailbiter.
Inform Your Consent 