Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? VP Debate Reactions: Part 2

Let no one say that Sarah Palin didn’t do an exemplary job in her debate with Joe Biden; she did. She was engaging, she was folksy, she was in far better command of the material than any of us expected. I wouldn’t have winked, I wouldn’t have clinched my teeth, and I certainly wouldn’t have pressed on talking points that Biden had already debunked. But she certainly outperformed relative to her expectations, and there’s not a person in the country who can say otherwise in good faith.

Too bad for her that someone else was up there on the stage. From start to finish, Biden refused to shrink from the conventional job of a VP nominee. He didn’t let Palin get away with saying that Obama would raise taxes on people when he wouldn’t, and he didn’t let her have the last word when she tried to recycle a sound bite he’d already swatted down. Instead of demurring to her gender, as Team Blue had promised he might, Biden came out swinging, strongly disagreeing with her, oblivious to her gender, and ready on
every point.

Most columnists agreed that Palin had the lower expectations at the outset, but significantly fewer pundits noted that she also had the far more challenging objective to reverse the near comic tailspin in which the McCain ticket has found itself over the past ten to fifteen days. The undecided have been breaking hard for the challengers, with national tracking polls showing Obama leading by as many as eleven points, and an electoral map that’s lit as blue as a store-closing sale at a K-Mart. In the past three news cycles, Senator McCain has fumbled the repair of Palin’s Pakistan answer, he nearly came to blows with the Editorial Board of the Des Moines Register, and he apparently conceded the outcome in one of the few Kerry states in which he had been competing until recently, Michigan. This election is now–has been for some time now–Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s to lose.

Sinking Governor Palin neck deep into this kind of hothouse atmosphere, with those kinds of stakes (especially after her recent performances) was nothing short of electoral malpractice on the part of Team Crankypants. However, to her credit, Palin did nothing, absolutely nothing to hurt McCain’s cause. The trouble is that when you’re eleven points down, doing nothing to hurt your own cause isn’t going to cut it.