Biden – Hank Kalet

Biden’s enthusiastic introduction

I may not like this bill much — it shovels cash to the insurance companies and does not go far enough to ensure coverage of everyone. But you have to like the enthusiasm of Vice President Joe Biden.

I can’t make out what he said, but if Biden dropped the f-bomb, as it is euphemistically called, then he moves to the top of the list as my favorite vice president.

Dick Cheney dropped it, too, but he used it to demean and degrade Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. And that was just an ugly episode.

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First polls are in on debate

The initial polling appears to show that the public viewed Joe Biden’s performance last night as the stronger one during the debate, which is probably not good news for the McCain campaign.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. said 51 percent of those polled thought Biden did the best job, while 36 percent thought Palin did the best job.

But respondents said the folksy Palin was more likable, scoring 54 percent to Biden’s 36 percent. Seventy percent said Biden was more of a typical politician.

Both candidates exceeded expectations — 84 percent of the people polled said Palin did a better job than they expected, while 64 percent said Biden also exceeded expectations.

I’ll have more later — I want to give the transcript a good going-over, because I think it is important that the cliches, talking points, etc., be dissected and examined.

VP debate post-mortem 3

The transcript of the debate is available at The New York Times and I thought I’d offer a few thoughts about her use of catch phrases.

From Gov. Sarah Palin’s first response, talking about the bailout plan and John McCains (uhem) role in it:

I think that the alarm has been heard, though, and there will be that greater oversight, again thanks to John McCain’s bipartisan efforts that he was so instrumental in bringing folks together over this past week, even suspending his own campaign to make sure he was putting excessive politics aside and putting the country first.

Now, consider: The ticket apparently is still prepared to foist the kanard of McCain’s selfless decision to abandon his campaign and broker a bailout deal, a deal that failed to materialize and that most of those involved say he had no role in.

That said, this response offers a glimpse into the basic themes she will be pushing throughout the night, through the use of campaign catch phrases — “John McCain’s bipartisan efforts” and “putting the country first.”

She then launched the “maverick” meme — “maverick, maverick, maverick” — which left me thinking of the Biden joke about Giuliani (noun, verb, 9/11), only in this case it was the noun, verb, maverick, noun, verb, bipartisan, noun, verb, country first.

I wasn’t impressed, but I wasn’t the target audience. We’ll have to wait a few days to see what the polls say.

VP debate post-mortem 2

I think Sarah Palin probably calmed some of the fears being expressed by conservatives this week, but I have my doubts as to whether her performance did anything to convince the undecided voter. Joe Biden was strong and often passionate, while Palin was folksy and cliche-driven. I’d hope that most Americans could see through her facade.

I think she prefers this format to the one-on-one interviews she’s been doing, because it doesn’t allow for the direct follow-ups that have tripped her up recently. The debate actually allowed her to avoid answering a lot of questions.

VP debate post-mortem 1

Wow. Chris Matthews hit the two most important points — that Sarah Palin wants to explore an increased legislative role for the vice president and that she has no interest in dealing with the press (or even answer the questions that Gwen Ifill asked).

My sense in watching it was 1) that she had a short list of talking points and phrases and stayed with them as much as she could, 2) that she often fell into a garbled syntax that may indicate a lack of analytical skill, and 3) that a McCain-Palin administration is dangerous.