I'm watching the debate, but not attempting to live blog it. But I have to say that while Palin is doing fine in general, she missed a huge opportunity. When Biden kept going on about how he and The One were going to "end" the war, she should have said, "Senator, you, Senator Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid...you all keep talking about ending the war. But Americans don't want to just end a war. They want to win the war. Why can you not let the word "victory" pass your lips when it comes America and the Iraq war?"
[Update a few minutes later]
Well, she keeps saying "win the war" and he keeps saying "end the war," so maybe the point will come across subtly, but it would have been a big blow had she pointed it out.
I have to say that Biden has been surprisingly gaffe free. He's told lots of whoppers, but no big gaffes.
I really wish McCain would have Sarah take his 3rd debate with Obama. That would put a stake through the heart of only a heartbeat away.
She could make a point of all the lawyers going through her trashcans in Wasilla and then bring up a list of Obama history the media seems unwilling to investigate.
"Missed opportunity", singular?
I wanted to scream every time she spoke of "Wall Street greed" instead of/without taking a poke at the corrupt Congressmen who had a big hand in the current financial mess. It would have set the record straight, and it would have scored points with the huge majority who appear to be dissatisfied with the performance of Congress lately.
That's at least a half-dozen more missed opportunities you can add to the list.
She was awesome. Missed opportunities? Feh.
Have you folks given really high-stakes e.g. career make-or-break talks in front of big crowds of people before whom you cannot make the smallest ignorant mistake?
Back in my academic career, I did this a lot. You go and give a job talk, or a seminar as a young academic looking for tenure, and you're talking to an entire academic department: forty duffers each with PhDs, a zillion years of experience in their small slice of science, and a jealous fierce belief that anyone who misrepresents the smallest fact about that small slice is a born idiot not fit to teach 3rd grade math, let alone college science. Not only that, but at least a third of the department hates you already, because you compete with their preferred candidate, who is someone else. Give them even a small dumbass comment to work with, and your chances evaporate, since you're one of about 200 applicants.
It is very very difficult to give a nontrivial 90 minute talk, make absolutely zero mistakes that some malevolent expert of a tiny slice can pick apart at his leisure later, and keep your cool and your poise. Given that Palin wasn't even on the national stage a mere four or five weeks ago, I'm really impressed. She can do that and govern a state with 80% approval ratings, raise a family of 5, make money catching fish in the most dangerous seas in the world, and fly her own plane? Yow. Hillary Who?
As for l'esprit d'escalier, also known as the Monday-morning quarterbacking of "missed opportunities"....eh, you read ten responses, you'll find ten different places where they saw a "missed opportunity." She'd have needed two or three days of debate just to cover everyone's favorite missed opportunity. What she kept in mind is that debates are almost never won by some clever zinger -- they're lost by a moment's inattention, gracelessness, foot in mouth, or childish loss of composure.
Gosh, I just hope she doesn't go down with the wreck of the S.S. McCain, and we see her again soon, maybe putting the final fork to a one-term Obama Jimmy Carter/David Dinkins spaz act in 2012. What a cruel act of fate that she sat down at the table just at the moment fate dealt her opponent four aces and her senior partner a pair of threes.
Actually I think Biden did gaffe a bit towards the end. When, as the VP for the candidate of 'changey, change, change', he said, "Look I've been doing this for 35 years, I'm not gonna change."
Palin surpassed the expectations she had set for herself with the Couric and Gibson interviews. Beyond that, for Carl to claim her performance was "awesome" is probably the huge sigh of relief that she didn't spout complete gibberish.
Listen carefully to many of her answers. About half the time and particularly in the latter half, they weren't answering anything at all. If the moderator had not already been stifled by suppositions of her bias, she would likely have asked follow up questions. As we know, that is where Palin has to be specific and invariably starts babbling. Palin was very lucky to have Gwen Ifill moderate.
Bottom line - she surpassed expectations. But the expectations were a bar on the floor, and jumping over that isn't "awesome." Clearly, as the post debate polls observed, Biden won this quite handily. Good for him.
Sarah Palin 2012?
Yes, I predict we shall see that develop. And Bobby Jindal and Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney shall be none too happy about it.
I heard from Biden "Bosniacs".
Sam, "Bosniaks" is correct; that's the proper term.
Palin surpassed the expectations she had set for herself with the Couric and Gibson interviews.
Duh, Mike, in the debate she had a stack of prepared notes. If you're wondering why she kept answering a somewhat different question than the one that was asked, the reason for that is also right there on paper.
In the interviews it had to be her own words. It wasn't just Couric and Gibson. The Hannity interview was bad too, despite Hannity helping her out and acting like she was great.
Palin deserves credit for being good at reading aloud. That's how she dodged a bullet last night. Her challenge now is to avoid interviews.
If I may correct myself, I've just read parts of the debate transcript. She did spout gibberish quite a bit. I think the reason it wasn't obvious is because of her fixed grin and demeanour, and perhaps the glow on her face, which could come from breast feeding - a hard thing for Biden to match ;-).
So the audience really focuses on her body language rather than what she is actually saying. Reading the transcript, you see how her cue cards or talking points blended into sub-sentences.
Sullivan has a great exceprt of her gibberish from last night up on his site. Carl, you should check that out. It really is awesome. She definitely has a talent for spouting nonsense and yet looking like she is actually giving a sensible answer.
And Joe Biden has a talent for spouting authoritative bullshit. Even ignoring all his fantasies about McCain's votes, when did the Americans and French throw Hezbollah out of Lebanon? When did anyone? In what alternate Bidenverse did that occur?
"When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said, and Barack said, ‘Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know — if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.”
He obviously wan't referring to Hezbollah both times he said Hezbollah, since, in a metaphor, the the thing that is removed to create a vacuum won't be the same thing that fills the vacuum. It seems likelier to me that he didn't mean Hezbollah the first time. As your link suggests, he probably did mean Syria was kicked out of Lebanon. The story of how and why that happened resists a one sentence summary. If it isn't fair to say that the USA and France kicked Syria out, it also isn't accurate to say that the Lebonese did it. (Without outside support, a Syrian withdrawl wouldn't have happened the way it did.) Needless to say, all of this is completely over Palin's head.
And Joe Biden has a talent for spouting authoritative bullshit. Even ignoring all his fantasies about McCain's votes, when did the Americans and French throw Hezbollah out of Lebanon?
No question, Rand, Biden used the wrong word. When he said that the US and France threw Hezbollah out of Lebanon, he should have said Syria.
What's really foolish about your interpretation of this is your football-fumble-and-referee-whistle mentality. For you it's always "Bwah ha ha, he gaffed! He fumbled! We got it on tape! No takebacks!" There is a lot of access to Biden on the road, so if the Lebanon question really mattered, some intrepid independent "journalist" from Pajamas Media could go ask him about Hezbollah. The trait of well-prepared people is not that they don't gaffe, it's that they can correct gaffes.
Palin, by contrast, has had no national press conferences, almost no road questions, and three embarrassing national interviews. But that has been enough. She has argued several times that see Big Diomede Island from Little Diomede Island gives her insight into Russia. It's not a gaffe. She really doesn't know that it's BS, and she also doesn't care.
Anonymous wrote:
Sam, "Bosniaks" is correct; that's the proper term.
Actually it looks like someone went into Wikipedia and removed a sentence that said:
" ''Bosnian [[Muslim]]'' is an imprecise [[synonym]] for Bosniak, because in Bosnia, Bosniaks make up 48% of the population, but only 40% of the population (of B&H) is Muslim."
In effect, Bosniak, is a word denoting a group of people in Bosnia but is not really meant to be applied to all Bosnians.
Looks like Biden did have a major gaffe last night, in saying -- repeatedly, insistently, and passionately -- that we spend more in three weeks in Iraq than we have spent in the entire six and a half years in Afghanistan.
Per numbers on the greatest weekly expenditure in Iraq at any point has been a hair over $3B ($158B for all of 2008). Using that as the most generous (to Biden) figure, three weeks of Iraq is a bit over $9B.
In the six and a half years we've been involved in Afghanistan, the total expenditure has actually been $177.5B, or nearly twenty times greater than what he claimed.
Now, of course we have to give Senator Biden the benefit of the doubt here. Surely he meant to say something entirely different than what actually came out of his mouth each of the three or four times he repeated this assertion during the debate.
Whups -- should have said "Per numbers on Medved's show this morning, taken from the Congressional Research Service".
list of Obama history the media seems unwilling to investigate.
Oh come on!
His past got dissected in pretty significant detail during the year long and bitter primary campaign that our erstwhile host insisted would end in a massive fight at the DNC.
People saw it, they digested it, now they're bored of it.
Likewise McCain shot a lot of his good stuff at Obama during the aftermath of the RNC with a simple game plan. Get a post convention surge, get a bigger than expected bounce from Palin and hold onto that for the next 6 weeks.
The problem for that was that the paper that the current government have been slapping over cracks in the economy finally fell off and Palin's bounce turned out to be something of an illusion after those interviews.
She did better than expected, but frankly, given the bar that's not hard. The problem for McCain is Biden also did better than expected. He got a serious reaction to almost crying when he spoke about his wife and son, and there was a gasp from the room when Palin steam rollered ahead after that without a pause.
Tina Fey will be practicing that wink already.
Surely he meant to say something entirely different than what actually came out of his mouth
First off the argument was never that Biden "meant to say something entirely different from what actually came out of his mouth." As far as I know, Biden meant to say what he said every time, right or wrong. The question is, does he know how to fix a mistake when people call him on it?
Second, his comparison of Iraq and Afghanistan was a wild exaggeration, all the worse given that he repeated it several times. And he should be called on it. It is true that Iraq has been far more expensive than Afghanistan, just not by the ratio that Biden claimed.
It's also true, as Obama has said very clearly, that Iraq has sapped our fight in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And Obama is at the top of the ticket. And to be fair, McCain is at the top of the ticket and not Palin.
Hmmmm.
"No question, Rand, Biden used the wrong word. When he said that the US and France threw Hezbollah out of Lebanon, he should have said Syria."
Nonsense. Syria was never "thrown out" of Lebanon. They reduced the visibility of their operations and presence, for a time, there but their grip on Lebanon is as tight as it has ever been.
His past got dissected in pretty significant detail during the year long and bitter primary campaign that our erstwhile host insisted would end in a massive fight at the DNC.
Yes, there was so much discussion of Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers, the Annenberg Challenge, Reverend Wright, etc., in the Democrat primaries.
What universe were you watching those primaries in again? The sky is blue in this one.
Yes, there was so much discussion of Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers, the Annenberg Challenge, Reverend Wright, etc., in the Democrat primaries.
Actually the New York Times did cover Rezko and Wright during the primaries. In fact they put Wright on the front page.
memomachine wrote:
.....Nonsense. Syria was never "thrown out" of Lebanon. They reduced the visibility of their operations and presence, for a time, there but their grip on Lebanon is as tight as it has ever been.
Yea, I'm shaking my head at why so many libs are clamoring to cover for this gaffe by saying he meant Syria. When, the U.S. or France didn't force Syria out either. I suppose they will say he didn't mean to say that either. Let's just say that Biden isn't the gaffe machine, he's the metaphor machine. While what he says on the surface is in itself not truthful. It is a symbol for truthiness, or something.
And what pray tell is Joe Biden looking for exactly when he goes to Home Depot all the time. Perhaps a crowbar sufficient to pry foot from mouth.
Looks like some people checked for a 'Katie's restaurant' in Wilmington only to discover that it went out of business 15 years ago. I suppose the pancakes were so good Joe still dreams of going to that restaurant in his head on a daily basis. Mmmmmmm Pancakessss.
for Carl to claim her performance was "awesome" is probably the huge sigh of relief that she didn't spout complete gibberish.
Well, thanks for the free psychoanalysis. Do you do windows, too?
Listen carefully to many of her answers.
Er, that's what I did. And how I came to my conclusion. And since I've had actual real-world experience giving and evaluating career make-or-break public talks in front of semi-hostile (or at least highly critical) audiences, I'm confident my conclusion reflects reality, just as I'm confident yours reflects mere well-programmed Obamabot goodthink.
Actually the New York Times did cover Rezko and Wright during the primaries. In fact they put Wright on the front page.
It also had a lot of airtime on major TV networks and the cable news networks too.
Live with it Rand. These were brought up, they were discussed, Obama took a hit in the polls and then moved on.
The problem isn't so much Obama at this stage as the pigs ear McCain is making of the campaign. He might pull off a miracle at this stage, but looking at historical comparisons doesn't make good reading for McCain either, not with the polls where they are.
He's got to hope that Obama completely screws up the next two debates and the economy magically improves.
He's got to hope that Obama completely screws up the next two debates and the economy magically improves.
Except I doubt McCain hopes any such thing. That's not who he is. He's not running for President because not being President is a personal disaster for him, or because he thinks it's a disaster for the country. He thinks he's got something to offer, so he lays that out for the public to consider. If they like it, they elect him. If they don't, they don't, and he goes back to being senior Senator from Arizona and Sarah Palin goes back to being the most popular governor in the US.
I don't think either wants to win if the only way to do so is to totally mispresent the other side, or rely on some terribly bad luck for all of the rest of America. In that, I find a strong contrast with the Democrat/MSM Obama machine. They certainly act as if a loss by Obama would be an unprecedentedly hideous personal and national disaster, and therefore any method of winning whatsoever is acceptable.
Here's Joe Biden, warning all us God-damn fool voters who still aren't polling at 80% for Obama that "this is the most important election in which you've ever voted," and Barry telling us only if he's elected will the planet begin to heal, and Obamabots actually gloating over the tragedy in the mortgage market because it might help to elect The One, which is nauseating, if you give a damn about real people at all.
By contrast I like the fact that McCain couldn't get very worked up about Gwen Ifill's book -- "Eh, BFD" seemed to be his reaction -- and Governor Palin on Hugh Hewitt's show said she's cool with the wild-eyed hysteric media bias, that it just fires her up, and then referring to her debate as fun, not a last solemn chance for the Guardians of Truth to educate a dangerously independent-minded electorate. I like the fact that neither suggests the Republic will implode if they lose, that they don't confuse their personal loss with a national tragedy.
And, frankly, to my Jeffersonian view, any party that wants power as desperately and cynically as the Democrats do should be kept far away from it.
which is nauseating, if you give a damn about real people at all.
Your perception on that largely depends on how "hermetically sealed" your mind is :)
If you are of the opinion that the current problem is going to require a pretty nasty sea change in US culture and habits then you won't have a problem with any of it. It IS the most important election that anybody will vote in.
Interestingly, as an outsider to your political system, what I find ironic is this: all the charges you lay at the Democrats' door are pretty much what I have observed the GOP doing for the last 2 elections. The difference this time is the Democrats appear to have learned the game. Especially how to raise and tactically spend money.
In that respect it's not that disimilar to what Tony Blair did to the Tories in the mid-90s in Britain.
Yea, I'm shaking my head at why so many libs are clamoring to cover for this gaffe by saying he meant Syria. When, the U.S. or France didn't force Syria out either.
No, this is the way that President Bush described it:
It's a completely fair summary of this paragraph that we forced Syria out of Lebanon. Now it's true that Bush added some hyperbole to the truth, and maybe Biden would ideally have toned it down. But it's reasonable enough to take Bush at his word.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060831-1.html
Jim, I agree with you, but I think Bush was speaking the language of diplomacy. I think the United States used other kinds of leverage on Assad as well, or at least, Assad was worried that we would start using such leverage. I believe there was discussion about this at the time in untrustworthy "MSM".
Carl says:
Er, that's what I did. And how I came to my conclusion. And since I've had actual real-world experience giving and evaluating career make-or-break public talks in front of semi-hostile (or at least highly critical) audiences, I'm confident my conclusion reflects reality, just as I'm confident yours reflects mere well-programmed Obamabot goodthink.
I'm hardly impressed by your voluble self-praise. Of all the posters here, I have noticed that you the only one to offer regular pats on your own back referring to some superior skill or experience that you possess? Insecure, are you Carl?
Daveon, Jim Harris, Bob, and Mike Gerson, people are just going to start (and/or continue) ignoring you now, I sure am. Don't expect any explanations as I'm sure people have better things to do.
HH, that's too bad. The Cedar Revolution is an interesting subject, full of anomalies that require explanation (as does much of Syria's behavior). It is quite a challenge to reconcile the popular story of the Cedar Revolution with the way Syria behaved in Hama, Syria (town completly and utterly destroyed, 20,000 to 40,000 people killed, the Syrian government takes school children there to teach them what happens when you defy the Syrian government).