A British view of the Palin-Biden debat

We're apparently so hypnotized here in the States by the process -- as explained and critiqued by our media punditry -- that we've come to think that rising to the lowest of expectations can be seen as victory... to judge by a not-so-quick survey of the punditry this post-debate morning.

But in the London Times' Times Online, writer Chris Ayres isn't having any of the reverse sexist fawning indulged in by so many US writers, seemingly afraid to treat GOP darling Sarah Palin as they would, say, a male candidate for fear of somehow being labeled sexist...

It was hard not to feel just a tiny bit sorry for Joe Biden during last night’s vice-presidential debate.

There he was, a US Senator with a God-given talent for minutia and condescension, his car salesman’s hairdo almost visibly bristling with contempt for the former Alaskan beauty queen standing beside him, but the rules of engagement read to him by his Democrat Party handlers specifically forbade him to say anything that could in any way whatsoever be construed as "talking down" to his vastly less experienced opponent — and therefore to female voters in general.

Even when Palin got a General’s name wrong.

And even when the Alaskan governor appeared to have no clue as to the meaning of "Achilles’ heel".

While his characterizations of Biden are often somewhat unflattering, the spectacle of the exceedingly knowledgeable Biden sharing the stage with the winking, mugging talking point driven neo-populist seemed almost too much for Ayres:

While Biden’s performance was largely an exercise in self-restraint, Palin’s was at once excruciating and possibly brilliant. During one question, she could be seen wiping sweat from between her palms. At other times she winked while making a cheesy clicking noise. At no point did she ever seem comfortable with the English language, never mind the questions at hand. On several occasions she seemed to respond to the moderator by simply stringing a number of memorised phrases together, in no particular order, while looking for all the world like a crippled moose caught in the headlamps of rapidly advancing snowmobile.

You can read all of the lengthy -- and moderately droll -- analysis here.

Now THIS is a celebrity endorsement.... bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley puts down his marker for Obama

This writer doesn't often go gaga over a celebrity endorsement -- but then the celeb in question is almost never a true bluegrass legend. In this case, not just a legend -- but a veritable patriarch in the banjo and fiddle world -- Ralph Stanley, who became famous almost 60 years ago with his late brother, Carter, as the Stanley Brothers. According to the Boston Globe:

Democrat Barack Obama has a famous, twangy voice speaking for him in Virginia’s mountains: bluegrass music legend Ralph Stanley.

The Grammy-winning pioneer of the high lonesome sound of Appalachian music is featured in a new radio ad for Obama’s presidential campaign playing across southwestern Virginia, Stanley’s home.

Obama is fiercely contesting the region covered mostly by the mountainous, coal-mining, rural and largely white 9th Congressional District. Though Obama crushed rival Hillary Clinton in Virginia’s February Democratic primary, Clinton won 65 percent of the vote [in the district].

Stanley may be most familiar to mainstream music fans for his his performance of "O Death" in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

With banjos picking in the background, Stanley opens the folksy 60-second ad with, "Howdy, friends ..." He claims Obama will cut taxes for "everyday folks" and invest in rural areas to keep children from leaving home to find jobs. [...]

Stanley’s mountain music won Grammies in 2002 and in 2003. His first Grammy, for a haunting a capella rendition of "O Death," helped popularize mountain music nationally as part of the soundtrack to the film "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

Not much to laugh at but...

There's not much to laugh at this week but the column, McCain vs. Palin, from the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus, reprinted at RealClearPolitics.com (don't forget to check the latest RCP poll-of-polls), has got more than a couple of great moments:

Listening to McCain debate was like a stroll down foreign policy memory lane: Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko. George Shultz, "our great secretary of state." Perestroika. SDI.

Those were the days, my friend. We thought the Cold War would never end.

"Back in 1983, when I was a brand-new United States congressman ... ," McCain reminisced. And, "I supported Nunn-Lugar back in the early 1990s." By the time McCain described how the Pakistan-Afghan border "has not been governed since the days of Alexander the Great," you were half-expecting that he was going to tell you about how he led the congressional delegation that met with Alexander.

I urge you to read the whole thing.

You need a laugh...

Palin-mania metastisizes...

Well... the faster they rise the faster they fall.

We've all read sympathetic, even reluctant slaggings of the GOP VP nominee, Sarah Palin.

This writer was refreshed by a singularly uncharitable reaction to the sympathy-fest from Salon writer, Rebecca Traister:

Don't get me wrong, I'm just like all of the rest of you, part of the bipartisan jumble of viewers that keeps one hand poised above the mute button and the other over my eyes during Palin's disastrous interviews. Like everyone else, I can barely take the waves of embarrassment that come with watching someone do something so badly. Roseanne Barr singing the national anthem, Sophia Coppola acting in "The Godfather: Part III," Sarah Palin talking about Russia -- they all create the same level of eyeball-squinching discomfort.

But just because I'm human, just because I can feel, just because I did say this weekend that I "almost feel sorry for her" doesn't mean, when I consider the situation rationally, that I do. Yes, as a feminist, it sucks -- hard -- to watch a woman, no matter how much I hate her politics, unable to answer questions about her running mate during a television interview. And perhaps it's because this experience pains me so much that I feel not sympathy but biting anger. At her, at John McCain, at the misogynistic political mash that has been made of what was otherwise a groundbreaking year for women in presidential politics.

She goes on to put a much finer point on her plaint:

In her "Poor Sarah" column, Warner writes of the wave of "self-recognition and sympathy [that] washed over" her when she saw a photo of Palin talking to Henry Kissinger. Palin -- as "a woman fully aware that she was out of her league, scared out of her wits, hanging on for dear life" -- apparently reminded Warner of herself. Wow. Putting aside the massively depressing implication that Warner recognizes this attitude because she believes it to be somehow written into the female condition, let's consider that there are any number of women who could have been John McCain's running mate -- from Olympia Snowe to Christine Todd Whitman to Kay Bailey Hutchison to Elizabeth Dole to Condoleezza Rice -- who would not have provoked this reaction. Democrats might well have been repulsed and infuriated by these women's policy positions. But we would not have been sitting around worrying about how scared they looked.

Fox pulls AP story suggesting key conservatives demand Palin step down? Calls for Palin step down step up from the right...

It appears that an AP story was removed from Fox News after it topped its category on Google News. Here is the headline and excerpt from Google News:

Conservatives Begin Questioning Palin’s Heft
FOXNews - 4 hours ago
by AP A growing number of Republicans are expressing concern about Sarah Palin’s uneven - and sometimes downright awkward - performances in her limited media appearances.

But the link simply brings up one of several page-not-found messages from Fox's website and a search using their own online search produces a number of related Palin/election stories -- but not that one.

The New York Daily News has a brief write-up on Palin's fall from GOP grace.

Time Magazine has an analysis that seems to suggest part of what has got the right worried:

[W]e should stop pretending that she is ready now or anytime in the forseeable future to be Commander-in-Chief.

I reached this conclusion after watching the foreign-policy portion of her disastrous Sept. 25 interview with Katie Couric. A number of commentators, including The Atlantic's James Fallows and Slate's Christopher Beam, have said that Palin resembled, in Beam's words, "a high-schooler trying to BS her way through a book report," which is an insult to both high-schoolers and B.S. Palin's answers were hesitant, convoluted and at times — like when she appeared to suggest that Vladimir Putin might be preparing a one-man airborne invasion of Alaska — downright loony.

But the more worrisome responses were the ones that betrayed her lack of curiosity about current events and reliance on bumper-sticker wisdom over complex thoughts. There were moments, in fact, in which you wondered whether she had been paying any meaningful attention to the world outside Alaska before McCain picked her as his running mate a month ago.

Conservative, National Review columnist [permit pulled from Department of Redundancy Department for that descriptive] Kathleen Parker lays it out to other conservatives in a no-nonsense fashion, as quoted by the AP. Saying that her "cringe reflex is exhausted" watching Palin's awkward and stumbling interview performances, Parker wrote in National Review Online:

"No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I've been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I've also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does.

"Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first."

McCain disappointed by media debate 'tie' consensus

[ In-depth debate poll results from Gallup ]

John McCain says he's disappointed.

His campaign has maintained he won Friday night's first presidential debate of the general election, outpointing Obama. They've said they were pleased that their man came off aggressively and was on the attack much of the time. Going unspoken, no doubt, was relief that McCain, did not lose his infamously volatile temper.

According to Reuters, McCain said:

“I was a little disappointed the media called it a tie but I think that means, when they call it a tie, that means we win,” McCain said during a telephone call that was caught by cameras filming him at his campaign headquarters.

The media consensus did run to a declaration of tie. And a tie was not what McCain needed after what many suggested was the worst week of his campaign, with a near-disastrous Katie Couric primetime interview with McCain VP running mate Sarah Palin, a week that began once again with McCain's assurance that US economic fundamentals were, in his words, "sound," and ended with him publicly putting his campaign "on hold" until an economic bail-out could be fashioned in Congress -- a move that was widely seen by the public as a "gimmick" -- and only two days later rescinding that suspension -- despite the fact that no agreement had been reached -- so that he could participate in the long-scheduled presidential debate, which polls had shown American's overwhelmingly wanted to proceed.

If McCain was disappointed by the media's tie designation, where does that leave his emotional state in the wake of polling that uniformly has shown that Americans by substantial margins felt that Obama had bested McCain in the debate?

ABC News:

A new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows 46% of people who watched Friday night's presidential debate say Democrat Barack Obama did a better job than Republican John McCain; 34% said McCain did better.

Obama scored even better -- 52%-35% -- when debate-watchers were asked which candidate offered the best proposals for change to solve the country's problems.

The effects of the win were somewhat muted on opinions of McCain, though, at least by the numbers:

The poll suggested the debate was to some extent a wash for McCain: 21% of those who watched say it gave them a more favorable view of him, 21% say less favorable and 56% say it didn't change their opinion much.

Obama did somewhat better:

Three in 10 said their opinion of Obama became more favorable after seeing the debate, compared to 14% who said less favorable and 54% who said it didn't make much difference.

But the takeaway on what really matters to Americans at the moment -- the economy -- had to be a major disappointment for McCain, who has shot himself in the foot repeatedly on economic matters, conceding to reporters earlier this year that he doesn't know much about economics, and, on at least two occasions when the news of the day screamed the opposite, telling Americans in so many words that the US economy was "fundamentally sound." (And it certainly doesn't help McCain's image as a chief exec that his key adviser on the tech economy, Carly Fiorina, was, quite famously, fired as CEO of Hewlett Packard for poor performance.) Last week, his attempts at reassurance on economic fundamentals came almost simultaneously with economic analysts calling the yawning chasm of US debt the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930's.

More than one-third of viewers, or 37%, said they had less confidence in McCain to fix economic problems after seeing the debate; 23% said more. For Obama, the survey results were 34% more confidence, 26% less.

And, on foreign policy -- a topic on which McCain has previously been seen by US voters as more experienced and more capable than his younger rival -- the debate was a draw in the minds of those polled:

Neither candidate broke away on national security and foreign policy. About a third of viewers said they had more confidence in each man on that front after the debate, and slightly less in each case said they had less confidence.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of post-debate polling for the McCain camp comes directly from the Gallup organization's own write-up on the attitudes of all-important independent, "swing" voters:

[...] among the crucial group of independents who watched the debate -- those most likely to actually be swayed by what transpired, Obama won by 10 points, 43% to 33%.