The long-anticipated clash of the VP candidates did not turn out to be the Palin Fry Fest that many commentators anticipated. She ignored questions, bewildered with her monologues and looked shaky on foreign policy - but that was to be expected. She slipped but did not fall. "It was a 90-minute sprint to reclaim her identity as a feisty, folksy frontierswoman ready to storm Washington." Many pundits have claimed a victory for Palin. However, especially in the European media, Biden is hailed as the winner. Palin's folksy appeal obviously does not extent beyond the Atlantic.
Daniel Finkelstein of the Times claims that by not winning the debate, Palin lost for the McCain campaign:
"McCain's only hope is to shock the race somehow. He succeeded in doing it at the convention. He tried and failed during the bailout crisis. But there aren't very many opportunities to repeat the trick and last night was one of those. It was a long shot, but still a shot. So Sarah Palin needed to win last night. Of course Republicans feared disaster, but avoiding disaster wasn't enough. Avoiding disaster means the race goes on smoothly and serenely. And if it does that, Obama wins. So by not losing Biden won."
Marc Pitzke of Germany's Der Spiegel credits Biden for his strategy of not tearing Palin into pieces over foreign policy: "Biden, who could have ruthlessly picked her arguments to pieces, spared her and directed his attacks at McCain." He goes on to draw the line from Palin to the Bush administration: "The barrage of words was often unrelated to the question at hand. And Palin was proud: 'I may not answer the question that either moderator or you want to hear but I'm going to talk straight to the American people,' she said. This exceptionally brazen comment, which was buried in the flood of words, recalled the rigid stance of the Bush administration: We don't give a damn about rules."
Patrick Healy of the International Herald Tribune is particularly uneasy about Palin's avoidance of questions: "Palin also tended to seize on a single point or phrase of Biden or the moderator, Gwen Ifill of PBS, and veer off on her own direction in her 90-second answer. Asked whether the poor economy would cause McCain to cut his spending plans, Palin picked up on Biden's discussion of energy to rail against Obama's positions on energy and talk about her fights against oil companies in Alaska."
Finally, Svein Melby, head of the Centre for Transatlantic Studies at the University of Oslo, goes into the same direction and compares Palin to an automatic answering machine in Norway's Aftenposten.
The right-wing media on the left side of the pond credits Palin for her down-to-earth appeal and praise her rehabilitation after the disastrous Couric interview. One can almost smell the sweet odeur of relief in the Republican blogosphere.
The major US broadsheets differ greatly in their assessments of the debate: The New York Times said that "the debate did not change the essential truth of Ms. Palin's candidacy: Mr. McCain made a wildly irresponsible choice that shattered the image he created for himself as the honest, seasoned, experienced man of principle and judgment. It was either an act of incredible cynicism or appallingly bad judgment." On the contrary, the Wall Street Journal believed Palin "more than held her own" in debating foreign policy and had proved herself "worthy of the national stage."
