So yet again no big gaffes. They both stuck to talking points, sometimes completely ignoring the question, At first Ifill was trying to move things along too quickly and the debaters wanted to stay on some topic, but the result was they had no order.
Palin was almost completely non-specific except when attacking Obama on votes. Biden was much more specific and covered a lot of different things, bringing up healthcare, education, etc. He was better, but there wasn't a knock out. She often didn't answer the question and no one called her on it (once Biden said I didn't hear a plan there"). As a result this debate was easier for her than the Couric or even the Gibson interview.
Biden should have brought up things to throw Palin off her talking points. I was waiting for "I was in the Senate with him, I know how he voted". It took until there were only 5 minutes left before Biden finally said that McCain has not been a maverick. He never asked if her if she's done anything for energy that wasn't oil or natural gas related?
About an hour in Palin got even thinner on details and had to just repeat platitudes and neither Biden or Ifell said "what does that mean?" Biden never said, what are those small town values going to do? You need polices to affect people, what are your polices? And when she said I''m going to talk straight to the american people and without the filter of the media, he never made any comment like "It's nice to finally hear from you".
CNN had their little graph at the bottom of how Ohio voters (split between men and women) were reacting to the speech. I was surprised at time of how it moved. Biden did well with women. It usually was flat or raised, the only big negative swing was when Palin said that Obama's plan in Iraq was "a big white flag of surrender". What worked best was when they mentioned the middle class broadly but telling the story of a specific family or town didn't.
2 comments:
One thing I learned from the debate is that the surge worked. I guess we were wrong.
My understanding is that it didn't do much. Yes some violence was down in Baghdad but of course there wasn't the political reconciliation it was supposed to enable. Moreso, the violence in other districts were clearly not caused by the surge, they were caused by use bribing people not to fight. Also another reason for violence to drop in Baghdad is the ethnic cleansing was completed. Basically a million people have left the country and the remaining ones are no long living near other ethnic groups. That fighting would have ended with a surge or without.
News to me was watching Bill Maher interview Bob Woodward who claims to have been told about some classified documents that describe the success was not the surge but some other still classified techniques that were used. So perhaps we'll find out what they were much later in our lifetimes.
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