Joe Biden did a fine job in the vice presidential debate last night. His rhetorical prowess was impressive–something, in fact, to be studied–as was his superior grasp of foreign affairs and the details of his own, his running mate’s, and his opponent’s records. Sarah Palin’s repeated dodging and yes/no replies to questions–freeing her up time to launch into yet another string of talking points and generalities–grew tiring very quickly. But there were no melt-down, dear-in-the-headlights moments to compare with her recent ones in her surreal, stream-of-consciousness interview with Catie Couric.
One of my favorite moments was her reply to a question on global warming, in which she acknowledge some human role before shifting the blame to “cyclical temperature changes” and then trying to put it behind her with “. . . I don’t want to argue about the causes.” Biden was quick to bring the obvious riposte: “If you don’t understand what the cause is, it’s virtually impossible to come up with a solution. We know what the cause is. The cause is manmade. That’s the cause. That’s why the polar icecap is melting.”
It’s unfortunate, for Biden, that Sarah Palin’s recent performances have been so undeniably bad that she gets points for not repeating the same. But I think her clear lack of knowledge and insight into the issues was on clear display. Her efforts at home-spun, girl-next-door charm (someone tell me, what is up with all the winking?) were obviously engineered and did nothing to ausage legitimate skepticism about her ability to do the job she’s hoping to attain.
Biden did an excellent job of taking the fight past Palin and on to McCain and his ties to Bush’s failed policies. Palin’s cutsie chiding of him for looking to the past in order to determine the future (“Say it ain’t so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again”) only underscored her lack of understanding, as Biden himself pointed out later in his reply to the moderator, Gwen Ifill, in a clever allusion to The Tempest “past is prologue, Gwen.” Palin and her party may not see the value in learning from the past, but I certainly hope the rest of the country does.