biden

The international press may be on the fence when it comes to calling last night's winner in the vice presidential debate, but the New York right-wing tabloids have an unsurprisingly clear favorite.

I just spent the morning reading the New York Sun's total endorsement and celebration of Sarah Palin's performance ("Pitbull Sarah Shows her Bite") with the exception of a couple of less fortunate statements, including "How long have I been at this? Like, 5 weeks?" A group of hockey moms the newspaper had assembled to watch the debate, also saw Palin as the winner, although at least one of them still planned to vote for Obama.

New York's Daily News also cheered ("Pitt bull Sarah battles Biden and even takes a few chomps out of him") to an extent that made you wonder if they would have run the same headline no matter how the candidates had actually fared. Even their own online poll of readers is suggesting that Biden, not Palin, won. To their credit, the Daily News, as so many other newspaper and websites also ran a story pointing out which candidates lied about what.

It's pretty tragic that the first thing everyone looks for at the end of each debate is a list of lies and inanccuracies by candidates. Even if a candidate were trying to tell the truth it must be challenging considering the degree to which their own opinions veer on different issues, depending on the public climate. New York Times lists "check points" in the debate (in their awesome interactive video service), FactCheck.org crunch some numbers, and the Democratic Party's McCain "Lie Counter is is currently at "103".

03:30 Biden ends flatly. The debate winds up, families pour onto the stage (Palin's takes longer). Early verdict: it's a draw, with no serious slip-ups (or coups) by either candidate. Vice-presidents are meant to be innocuous, aren't they?

03:28 Post-apocalyptic Palin reverie! Strange monologue about our "sunset years" spent wistfully remembering "those days when we were free". Is this Fight Club? Terminator? Note to Republican advisers: wrong script.

03:26 Palin's never had to compromise on major issues because Alaska is some kind of wonderful bi-partisan idyll. With moose.

03:22 Biden gets real and emotional. Well done. Palin now looks snarky and ever-so plastic.

03:20 "Together, we form a perfect ideal," says Palin about herself and McCain. That's. Kinda. Scary.

Given Sarah Palin's recent string of media blunders-dubbed by insiders in the McCain campaign as a "borderline disaster"-it comes as no surprise that the Democrats are fervently seeking to raise the relatively low expectations surrounding Palin's performance and pre-empt a Republican upset by praising the Alaska Governor's debating skills right up to the very start of tonight's debate in St. Louis. Speaking to the press this evening, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe described Palin as "one of the best debaters in American politics." Plouffe's comments mirror similar statements by chief Obama strategist David Axelrod and Palin's opponent in the debate itself Senator Joe Biden.

While the US Vice Presidential debates have proven a locus for high theatre and some of the more memorable moments on the campaign trail in recent years - from Lloyd Bentsen's infamous admonishment of Dan Quayle for comparing himself to John F. Kennedy to James Stockdale's self-deprecating, "Who am I? Why am I Here?"- their impact on the course of the election itself has, in contrast, proven largely negligible, serving more as fodder for politicos within the media to debate and deconstruct ad nauseam than a soapbox through which to change the hearts and minds of the American electorate. Nothing illustrates this more vividly, perhaps, than the marginal impact Quayle's inept and widely-panned and parodied debate performance would prove to have on George H.W. Bush's relatively assured victory over Michael Dukakis in 1988.

A perfect storm with respect to issues of age, experience and gender, however, has conspired to ensure that tonight's debate in St. Louis between Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and Delaware's Senator Joe Biden will prove the most important of its kind since vice presidential candidates first squared up in 1976, and may ultimately prove the definitive turning point for both parties with little over five weeks left before election day. With America facing the prospect of its commander-in-chief entering office at the age of 72 in the event of a victory for Senator John McCain, the question of "who comes next" in the presidential line of succession has grown in importance amongst prospective voters in this election, placing as a result far greater scrutiny on the readiness of both candidates on the bottom of the tickets to lead than in previous election cycles.

With the spotlight growing ever more brighter, it should come as no surprise therefore that Palin's readiness to lead, rather than foreign policy or economics, has arguably become the all-consuming issue surrounding the McCain camp itself. Palin was the darling of the Republican Party and the new face of social conservatism only a month ago. Now, increased media attention over the meltdown of the world's financial markets, a string of gaffe-filled interviews with Charlie Rose, Sean Hannity and Katie Couric, and the subsequent call from numerous conservative commentators for her removal from the ticket has meant that the "Palin Bounce" briefly enjoyed by the McCain campaign has quickly been eroded by uncertainty over her qualifications.

Tonight has become very much a referendum on Palin herself: finally free from the straightjacket of her media handlers, if she fails to sufficiently replicate the energy, conviction and, most importantly, clarity of her coming-out speech at the Republican National Convention and appease concerns over her recent missteps, this debate may ultimately prove a far more damaging blow to John McCain's Oval Office aspirations than his mishandling last week of the congressional deliberation on the $700 financial bailout package.

Relegated to the fringes of electoral coverage since his unveiling in Denver, Biden now has an important and delicate role to play. Faced with the challenge of debating a female opponent with exceptionally low levels of expectation, Biden must shun his infamously verbose and long-winded style of rhetoric to match Palin's snappy sound bytes while finding an appropriate tone on the night with which to underscore the frailties of his opponent. But he must not come across as domineering, patriarchal, snide or misogynistic - a balancing act that George H.W. Bush found difficult when facing Geraldine Ferraro in 1984.

Failure to do so, given the lingering alienation of female voters within the Democratic Party created as a result of Obama's defeat of Hillary Clinton in the primary season, and the willingness of the McCain-Palin ticket to cry sexism in recent weeks with respect to the media's increasingly critical coverage, will inadvertently place the impetus back into Republican hands, and prove far more costly than any of the other more benign missteps "Joe being Joe" has made so far on the campaign trail.