The Veeps

Last night, I got tired and was having difficulty keeping up with the debate, so I taped it and went to sleep. This afternoon, I listened to it. I would have taped it anyway, just to hear it in pieces -- I need to be able to think about things -- but this had an unexpected advantage. I was able to slow down and just listen.

Biden knows his material. He really knows. Now, granted, he'd just been through a series of debate preps, and he knew where the hot spots were -- what would likely come up, what he wanted to have come up, the points he wanted to make, the points he wanted to refute. This stuff wasn't a surprise. But still -- listening to him, running down the lists, laying out details, citing circumstances -- he really knows his material.

Palin didn't. She knew the high points, and she laid out the party line on those high points well. She was good at juggling concepts. To me, they sounded canned, but thats not necessarily bad -- maybe she's just not as fluent as Biden. But she just didn't know her stuff in detail. I suppose the idea was that she would learn the key ideas and then practice with them -- juggling them, integrating them, and so forth. And she did a great job at it. Couldn't match detailed knowledge, though, so she did what she's been known to do (based on an article in the Christian Science Monitor by a guy who'd debated her before). She went folksy. She shrugged off the details and the numbers and talked like a hockey mom, all folksy and folk-wisdom.

Biden would have had my vote anyway, its true. He's on the ticket I like. But now I think: he won fair and square. He knew his stuff. She didn't. It won't convince the true believers in the other camp, I know. But it convinced me.