“Everybody gets extra credit tonight.”That was
moderator Gwen Ifill’s rejoinder late in Thursday night’s vice-presidential
debate to Republican candidate Sarah Palin’s hockey-mommish line that schoolkids
watching the debate should get extra credit.
If Ifill meant that, at the very least, both Palin and
Democrat Joe Biden were entitled to points for something they did, well, maybe
so. Biden did that which almost everybody said he had to do – avoid both (a)
coming on like a wonky Washington insider and (b) patronizing Palin. Accordingly, is he not
entitled to some credit? But extra? Hmmm. He did wonk a little, and
sometimes his avuncular disbelieving smile could not be avoided.
As for Palin, her mission was simple: Don’t self-destruct.
And she didn’t – largely because she came prepared in the only way a rank
outsider to the federal system of government could be – with punch-lines,
attack-lines, gambits, and diversions. And she used them all before it was all
over
Take the way she started. After greeting Biden, she asked,
“Can I call you Joe?” Lest anyone (like MSNBC analysts David Gregory and Chris
Matthews, both of whom missed her long-distance segue) think of that as a mere
folksyism, unfollowed-up-on, that little business had an obviously designed
sequel.
It came late in the debate when Biden had made one of
his pre-designed points, bashing the Bush administration and tying the
miscreants in power to the president’s would-be Republican successor John McCain. With the sprightliness of a quarterback calling a
gimmick play designed for a certain kind of defense, she offered this: “I say it
ain’t so, Joe. There you go again, pointing backwards.”
Ouch! A little bit of Shoeless-Joe-Jackson, for one thing. And a conscious echo of Reagan’s “There you go again”
riposte to Carter, for another. (And later on she actually revived the Gipper’s
“shining city on a hill!”) But the point surely was to let her drop the other foot on her
disingenuous request to be familiar. “May I call you Joe?” had been no amenity.
It was meant to set up her gotcha line. That was all the “Joe” stuff was about
in the first place.
But at least that patently contrived business had a point.
Why on earth did Biden keep referring to GOP nominee McCain,
his longtime Senate colleague, as “John”? Was that bit of clubbishness an
unconscious reminder that he (and McCain) were not exactly natural-born change
agents?
An oddity in this debate was that, while Democratic nominee Barack Obama’s name got dropped quite a few times — mainly by Biden pointing with pride, and sometimes by Palin viewing with alarm — he was never really a presence in the encounter, as both combatants and the absent McCain were.
Biden has to be credited for staying on point. A
few post-game kibitzers opined that he was “boring” – especially in the first
half of the debate. That’s only true if we’ve come to the point that
knowledgeable exposition is too much for all us ADD cases out there.
In point of fact, the first poll taken after the debate –
CBS’s sampling of undecideds, the kind of people who presumably are inclined to
be most open-minded and curious – gave Biden a whopping 46-21 edge and rated his
understanding of issues at a phenomenal 98 percent level. Palin was at 66
percent in that regard, something of a triumph in itself.
And, to be sure, Palin had moments in which she was able
once again, as at the GOP’s convention in St. Paul, to mesmerize an audience
with a smoothly delivered line, an unexpected quip, the kind of brazen, cocky
you-know-you-like me smile that all flirts — male, female, sexual or asexual –
deploy as a stock-in-trade.
But some of it was patently bunkum. Like her rhetorical
appeal to “Joe Six-Pack and the hockey moms across the nation.” Aside from the
unconscious and probably unintended allusion to her opponent in the repetition
of a cliché, she surely must know that almost none of us in the land will
encounter a bona fide “hockey mom,” no matter how wide and far we look, from sea
to shining sea.
And there was this, in response to moderator Ifill’s
request that she answer, as Biden had done, a question about McCain’s attitudes,
past and present, toward deregulation of the stock market: “I’m still on the tax
thing because I want to correct you on that again. And I want to let you know
what I did as a mayor and as a governor. And I may not answer questions the way
that you and the moderator want, but I want to talk straight to the American
people and let them know my track record also.”
The nonsense of that first: Biden had not said anything on
the “tax thing” that required “correcting” or commenting or what-have-you. He
had said nothing at all on the subject, hadn’t mentioned it. She had,
however. Asked about something else, she had gone on with the not-so-mavericky
Republican line about lower-taxes, less-government and wanted to do it again.
The actual sense of it, next: Palin was declaring
independence from Ifill, who would not, (or so this unknown-quantity governor
from Alaska was determined), turn into yet another persecuting interviewer like
Charles Gibson or Katie Couric, grilling her on weak points which (to give Palin
her due) she would no doubt catch up on – and long before she was that ominous
heartbeat away.
And it wasn’t just Ifill she was dissing, it was Biden,
too, who had just complained, with some justice and much exasperation, that she
Hadn’t. Answered. The. Question.
Well, no, she hadn’t. And she was damned if she would. Not
until she was good and ready.
For better and for worse, there is more to say about Ms.
Say-rah, whose role was at the heart of this debate. Just what?, you might ask.
Well, I’ll get back to ya on that! This is just a Part One.
In Part Two, we’ll dig a little into the issues as dealt with by the contestants. Stay tuned.
