According to every media outlet, Palin won because she exceeded the extremely low expectation set for her.
Gotta love how that's the standard for winning. Reminds me of when Bush "won" the debates against Gore and Kerry because he was able to say complete sentences without making a single fart joke.
Even the foreign media is breathlessly claiming a Palin win. Am I living in the Bizarro Universe?
3 comments:
There's a lot of people claiming Biden won too. It all depends on the site. I think Biden won and Palin avoided every question. Her Fargo accent was making me cringe.
The American people certainly didn't win. Palin refused to answer questions posed to her by the moderator (that Palin probably didn't have answers for anyway, so she fell back on prepared, canned statements), made inaccurate claims (the US commander in Afghanistan), and repeated lies about Barak Obama that McCain made during his debate that have since been debunked by the press.
I couldn't believe it when she sneeringly claimed that universal health insurance would be a terrible thing, since the Federal goverment has done such a bad job ("blunders" she said) handling things lately (the GOP want us to be taxed on the health insurance that employers provide us, so if you make $50k and your company pays $10k a year in health insurance, you will be taxed as if you make $60k--they're doing this to pay to give a $5k rebate to people who don't have employer provided health insurance so they can buy it). Yeah, who has been running the Federal government for the last 8 years? The Republicans, who think government is always the problem and the unregulated free market and corporate lobbyists can solve every problem we have. So, her basic message is the Republicans have screwed up this country over the past 8 years (Katrina, Iraq, WMDs, failing to prevent 9/11, illegal torture of POWs, suspension of habeus corpus, Guantanamo Bay, illegal wiretapping, signing statements, expanded and unfettered presidential powers, giant tax breaks to oil companies, politicization of the Justice Department, etc., etc.) and we should re-elect the Republicans who will essentially continue Bush's policies since they worked so poorly the first time around. The Republicans screwed everything up, so we have to elect them again to 'fix' everything using the same policies that broke everything in the first place? I don't think so.
Biden did pretty well, but should have hammered McCain harder on topics such as the war (what exactly does a "victory in Iraq" look like--the "surge" is essentially a very expensive stalemate--we're just going to occupy Iraq for the next 10 years? Where are the WMDs? What about the lies that the Bush administration told to start the war? Why haven't we captured Bin Laden yet?); the deregulation of Wall Street during the Bush years that McCain fully supported and has led to this extraordinary crisis in our economy; the claim that increasing taxes on the rich, super rich, and big corporations is going to lead to fewer jobs (Bush pushed through massive tax cuts and loopholes for the rich and corporations early in his first term, yet job growth did not explode, more Americans are without health insurance than ever, more Americans are living in poverty than ever, and unemployment is reaching new highs; during the Clinton years, when there were higher taxes on the rich and corporations, the middle and working classes fared pretty well and the gap between rich and poor was much smaller than it is now).
I could go on and on, but I need to stop before my head explodes.
Great commentary, Steve. I think Biden was being very careful and conservative about his image. He was mindful not to come off as an attack dog, as that would turn off women voters. I was quite surprised that he was able to pull off being low-key and respectful, but I was glad he got at least a few good zingers in there.
If he wanted to, he could've made Palin cry.
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