The VP debate left me with a really good feeling and a headache. The really good feeling came from watching and listening to Joe Biden. This was my first introduction to the man and after watching him handle Sarah Palin I felt much better about no longer backing John McCain.
My initial impression was “Ok, why isn’t he the lead on the Dem ticket?. I called one of my friends in the US who was having a really hard time voting for either party. A lot of women in the US were literally ‘distraught’ over Hillary’s loss and still waffling. But John McCain’s attempt at sweeping these women off their feet with his choice of Sarah Palin wasn’t going to get him votes from any women I knew. My friend and I chatted a good, long time and at the end I said to her “Don’t think of it as voting for Barack Obama. Think of it as voting for Joe Biden!”
The news hype leading up to the VP Debate was all about cutting Sarah slack because her two previous news interviews showed her to be an incompetent public speaker. She’d been secreted off to some special debate-training camp for a crash course in how to use talking points and we weren’t to expect too much.
Joe Biden, a seasoned public speaker and long-term senator who could easily rip Sarah a new one, was being publicly and repeatedly warned to ‘tone it down – give the lady a break” until I wanted to gag. If Sarah couldn’t handle a one-on-one debate with a peer, what on earth was she doing on the Rep ticket in the first place? You think some leader in a corrupt country in the middle east is going to “tone it down” because they’re negotiating with Sarah? pfft
The media kept explaining to us, ad nauseam, that all Sarah had to do to win this debate was to just not screw up really badly. Huh? This is the bar we set now for VP candidates? They’re all attending the Bush Academy of Clown Politics? What have they done to my country since I left? I thought public debates between candidates were all about strutting your stuff; About how well you composed yourself while in the line of fire; How well you could answer tough questions off the top of your head without having a prepared, scripted answer rolling off the teleprompter, making you look like you knew more than you actually did.
Today, it appears, a national debate is about talking points and how often you can defer the actual question to one of your talking points if you don’t like the actual question posed. The singular answer heard round the world is found in this bit of transcript:
IFILL: Senator?
BIDEN: The charge is absolutely not true. Barack Obama did not vote to raise taxes. The vote she’s referring to, John McCain voted the exact same way. It was a budget procedural vote. John McCain voted the same way. It did not raise taxes. Number two, using the standard that the governor uses, John McCain voted 477 times to raise taxes. It’s a bogus standard it but if you notice, Gwen, the governor did not answer the question about deregulation, did not answer the question of defending John McCain about not going along with the deregulation, letting Wall Street run wild. He did support deregulation almost across the board. That’s why we got into so much trouble.
IFILL: Would you like to have an opportunity to answer that before we move on?
PALIN: 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 the questions the way that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I’m going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also. As mayor, every year I was in office I did reduce taxes. I eliminated personal property taxes and eliminated small business inventory taxes and as governor we suspended our state fuel tax. We did all of those things knowing that that is how our economy would be heated up. Now, as for John McCain’s adherence to rules and regulations and pushing for even harder and tougher regulations, that is another thing that he is known for though. Look at the tobacco industry. Look at campaign finance reform.
IFILL: OK, our time is up here. We’ve got to move to the next question.
“Ok our time is up here?” That’s the moderator’s response to ‘I don’t want to answer the question I want to talk about what I want to talk about instead…’ ? Wow. Debate rules sure have changed.
Her answer though, led me to research her stint as mayor of Wasilla, a town, it turns out, which was debt-free until Ms. Palin took office. She left at the end of a 6-year term, in a blazing trail of financial debacles which the citizens of Wasilla are still paying off, today. The figure I found was $20,000. For a small town of 5,000 that’s a hefty debt. Add that to the million dollar hockey rink she built on land without performing a title search, which is now costing the citizen’s of Wasilla substantial legal fees to negotiate their way through and you have a not-so-fiscally-responsible record for Ms. Palin.
Does anyone ever make her accountable? Or does everyone just buy into her Fargo accent and cut her slack?
I watched the entire debate live, from my sofa in Australia. Watching Joe Biden handle himself and Sarah Palin reinforced my faith in the Democratic Party. I could get behind this ticket. Maybe I could even start cutting this Barack Obama guy some slack.
