I can already hear the protests of the Palin-haters. Joe Biden was brilliant, they will argue, simultaneously substantive and emotive, connecting with voters on both an intellectual and personal level. Palin, by contrast, clearly was unprepared for anything that was not on her note cards, and spoke in folksy and trite platitudes. Largely, I would agree. By any objective measure, Biden cleaned her clock. Polls showed that pluralities, and often majorities, of voters thought Biden had won the debate, and he demolished Palin on the question of whom voters thought was ready to be president. A post-debate Ipsos-McClatchy poll showed a six-point movement toward Obama among currently undecided leaning voters. These numbers, however, do not tell the whole story.
Coming off her disastrous performances in interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, Palin’s political stock was in subterranean territory. After her nomination and electrifying convention address had provided McCain with a sizeable post-convention bounce and a brief lead, the emergence of the fact that Palin was clearly not conversant on important economic and foreign issues had combined with the recent economic crisis to precipitate the Republicans’ late-September plummet in the polls. In the week leading up to the debate, prominent conservatives were openly calling for her to remove herself from the ticket, not least because of the fear that putting her on a stage with Biden would reveal to the American people how incompetent John McCain’s chosen second-in-command and potential successor really was. To paraphrase Churchill on Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Jellicoe, with a Gibson-Couric like performance on Thursday night, Palin could have lost the race in an evening.
That, she did not do. Unlike her interviews, the debate demonstrated that she had at least a passing familiarity with the English language. Her sentences were notable for their inclusion of nouns, verbs, and often prepositional phrases. There were no awkward, thirty-second pauses followed by patently ridiculous sound bites about Alaska being the first line of defense against Putin. She was able to give reasonably coherent answers on most major policy questions. Her responses on tax policy, especially, were effective attacks on Obama. Her flat-out declaration that she was not going to answer Biden’s or moderator Gwen Ifill’s questions, but instead would “talk straight to the American people,” although crass, came across to a large cross-section of the American electorate as spunky anti-establishmentarianism. To be sure, there were a few cringe-inducing moments. I got the distinct impression, for example, that she did not know what a “two state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict entailed. She definitely appeared blissfully unaware of the current progress of negotiations. Ultimately, though, she remained a player in the debate, exceeding the justifiably low expectations of both the punditry and the audience.
After the debate, the McCain camp vocally claimed victory. McCain paid tribute to “Sarah Barrcuda,” who had surprised the liberal media establishment again. Conservatives, who had assumed a gallows mentality toward the campaign over the past two weeks, were heartened. For, while Palin’s performance was not a race-changing moment for McCain, it may have been a race-saving one. Certainly, Obama is surging in the polls, and the McCain camp’s announcement that it was going to resort to a strategy of character assassination during October is an indication of the fact that the Republicans face unappealing, if not desperate, prospects on Nov. 4. However, if Palin had proven as hopeless during Thursday’s debate as might have been predicted based on prior appearances, whatever slim chances McCain had would have been snuffed out. Instead, she did not embarrass herself, and even held her own with a top-notch debater in Joe Biden. The McCain campaign lived to fight another day. On the hippocratic criteria—applicable in this case—of doing no harm, Palin’s performance Thursday must be judged a win.