I guess by the standard that I used to determine that Obama was last week’s winner because he exceeded expectations, Palin might be judged more favorably than Biden on tonight’s performance. I wanted more from her, so while I’m not deflated, I’m not impressed, either. I bet if there’s any boost from tonight (which there may well not be), it goes to Obama.

Hopefully Brokaw is correct and I’m wrong.

Palin did a lot better than I expected tonight. I don’t think it was enough, but at least it wasn’t a travesty. She clearly is not someone who has spent a lot of time reading National Review or the Weekly Standard, and her eloquence leaves a lot to be desired. She was shaky at the start and just sprang to her talking points on other issues whenever she didn’t have an answer at the ready. After that, she seemed to relax, and — even though she clearly didn’t understand a couple of questions, like the one about Cheney’s view of the V.P. role — she seems like the type who once a part of constant Washington combat, wouldn’t have much trouble adapting. Still, if you’re one of those who expects McCain to drop dead on January 28th, she doesn’t inspire immediate confidence, and I think she’s ultimately a loser for the McCain ticket amongst independents who crave a classic presidential figure. both Obama and Biden sweep the table in terms of style and pontification.

Watching Palin struggle over the last few weeks, and McCain fail to really seize the first Presidential debate, I sure miss Rudy Giuliani right now. What conservatives need right now is the anti-Bush: a forceful, smooth and articulate fighter who isn’t going to accept the paradigm of the Democrats and mainstream media, but will counterattack with strength and accuracy (and that big Giuliani smile).

Tonight’s debate started with a perfect opportunity for a Giuliani moment, when Gwen Ifill served up a soft volley, asking who either candidate blames for the current economic crisis. Palin babbled aimlessly about Wall Street greed, while Biden picked up the current and popular meme that GOP-and-Bush deregulation is to blame. He sold it, even though it is absolute horseshit. The McCain/Palin strategy on this is nonsensical. There is a treasure trove of documentation of Democratic encouragement to expand subprime mortgages, including strongarming lenders to grant riskier and riskier loans, in the name of racial and economic justice. just look here, for example, for some of the history of Democratic resistance to regulation of the GSE’s led by none other than current scold Barney Frank.  (Tangent: Who came up with these gay GSE names like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? I wince every time I hear them.)

A strong candidate would have put Biden on the defensive on this issue right away, but that’s not Palin, at least not this election. (If she survives this election with her dignity intact, she’ll remain in the national spotlight, and I’d expect her to be far more impressive in 4 years.) Right now she represents potential hope for ther future and a lot of missed opportunities right now. (I have read some rumblings that McCain is just waiting for a deal to be ironed out before he starts to highlight the liberal genesis of this mess, but I wouldn’t count on it.)

Just like with last week’s debate, I don’t expect many staunch supporters are going to be too discouraged by either performance tonight, but would expect more indpendents to drift toward Obama/Biden, just because they both appear more convincing, and the press will largely accept them as such.

This is bad news for McCain, because all signs point to a disaster next week when Palin faces Biden. I’ve said before that I like the way Palin brings out the worst in Democrats, but so far she’s got little else to show for herself. I can’t bring myself to watch her Katie Couric interview after hearing one soundbite.

Her best hope is that Biden puts on a display of contemptuous arrogance, ala Gore in 2000, but no doubt he’ll be trying his best to avoid that, and I wonder if even Biden at his buffonish worst can mask her obvious deficiencies in discussing, well, anything.

It hurts me to say it, but she may well be the big gamble that wipes McCain out, unless she comes out whip smart after weeks of bluffing. I fear watching Biden debate Palin will be less like 1992’s Gore vs. Quayle than it will be 1992’s Gore vs. Stockdale (but without another candidate present to carry on a conversation).

There’s been a lot of talk in conservative circles about how The Bush Doctrine has had so many evolutions of meaning over the last 6 years that even foreign policy professionals like Henry Kissinger have required greater clarification than Gibson provided Palin, but I don’t care. A good politician needs to know how handle themselves better than this. She did not look ready for the job.

I’m not writing Palin off. Obviously, the way she has changed the campaign — or at least fueled an explosion in a change that was already quietly underway since Obama’s Rainbow tour of Europe — is exciting, and I think she brings some intangibles to the McCain ticket. I don’t think this one bad appearance will hurt her with supporters (and I also enjoy the way she provokes instant outrage in opponents) but it wasn’t a good start by any measure. She’s going to need to get up to speed in a hurry to make this uncertain, shell-shocked, and dismal performance look like a fluke. That will show us how good she is, if she is.

Ironically, she appeared, to me, to be trying too hard to impress in that Gibson interview, but in doing so tried to inhabit a persona that wasn’t authentic. Instead of struggling to remember details intended to trip her up, she needs to find a way to handle wonky questioning by expressing her governing philsophy in the context of a bigger picture. But most importantly she needs to not do what bush does that often makes him look stupider than he is, and that is repeating the same thought several times in one answer. It’s OK to have a succinct response, as long it appears confident. And succinct.

Sarah Palin is a bit comical, like one of those cutthroat Texas cheerleader stage moms. What her Down syndrome baby and pregnant teenage daughter unequivocally prove, however, is that her most beloved child is the antiabortion platform that ensures her own political ambitions with the conservative right. The throat she’s so hot to cut is that of all American women.

I don’t want Sarah Palin being the representative leader and custodian of my rights, my Constitution and my country any more than I want polygamist compound leader Warren Jeffs baby-sitting for my preteen goddaughters.

As a woman who does not believe what Palin believes, the thought of such an opportunistic anti-female in the White House — in the Cheney chair, no less — is akin to ideological brain rape. What this Republican blowup doll does with her own insides in accord with her own faith is her business. But, like the worst and most terrifying of religious extremists, she seems very comfortable with the idea of imposing her own views on everyone else.

Cute. Why the venom? For the same reason that liberals spewed outrage at Clarence Thomas, I think there is the knee-jerk feeling that member of any so-called minority class who does not pay slobbering fealty to liberal minority class fetishism represents the purest form of ideological evil.

But that’s another issue. For all the talk about Karl Rove’s Terminator-like “Republican Attack/Hate Machines” I’ve never seen anything as remotely disparaging of Barack Obama coming from any major-ish media outlet. Sure, there are nutcase, deranged and vile right wing blogs and forums to match tit-for-tat with the likes of Daily Kos and democratic Underground. But where is the comparable hate in the virtual pages of National Review or Weekly Standard? Ann Coulter is tame in comparison to this kind of sex-and-violence-themed vitriol.

Granted there is no Salon equivalent on the right, but that hardly seems like an argument in the liberal media’s favor.

I think it is bad form for Republicans to play this silly game. I do not know Sarah Palin. But from what I know of her, I would guess that if she even noticed Obama’s desperate little performance her first, and probably her last, reaction was to laugh. Certainly (I feel sure) she would countenance no whining. Because some jerk as much as called you a pig? Get a life. Still, I would advise Obama not to reprise when she or her husband was actually in the room. Some loud mouth Harvard-educated twit bloviating to a bunch of losers on TV somewhere is one thing; actually insulting someone to her face is something else entirely. I’m not sure that’s the sort of thing Obama understands, but I bet he would be a quick learner.

In this clip from today, Obama appears to make a very crude reference to Sarah Palin’s “pitbull in lipstick” joke (no doubt, that’s how his own crowd took it):

My first reaction was that it was probably inadvertant, as the saying “put a pig in lipstick…” is quite old, Obama has used it before (so has McCain), and he could well have used that same phrasing again without harm if Palin had never made her now famous convention quip.

But this initially reasonable defense of Obama, especially as made here at The Atlantic, raises another question:

The McCain campaign has little respect for Obama, but they don’t think he is stupid. And the only way one can conclude that Obama meant to refer to Gov. Sarah Palin as a pig is to have concluded that Obama is as dumb as a doornail.

So if Obama didn’t mean to refer to Palin, and didn’t think about how it would sound in the current context, and didn’t have any staff who also thought the better of it, how much smarter than a doornail does that make them sound?

Regardless of the explanation, Camp Obama doesn’t come out of this as looking very bright. (It doesn’t help that his follow-up about an ‘old stinky fish’ could likewise be interpreted as a jibe at McCain.)

However, it is best in such squalid and trivial matters to let any bad impression set itself in the public consciousness as it will and leave it at that. Even at its worst, if Obama was intentionally attempting a backhanded insult, the only person such a sophomoric taunt could ultimately hurt is himself.

My guess is Palin has heard a lot worse and laughed. The over-aggressive media pursuit of any potential scandal has rallied a lot of support on her behalf, but that support will quickly fizzle if it starts to appear that McCain’s spinners are manufacturing outrage, or, worse, being overly sensitive.

McCain’s campaign should be above the indignity of demanding an apology… which, alas, they already have done. ‘Sticks and stones,’ please. The GOP should not play the party of hurt feelings. It’s gross, and undermines the strong Convention message which has so miraculously given the campaign a lifeline. Shrug it off.

No doubt, the manufactured controversies over Palin’s family helped boost that, but that’s a pretty phenomenal turnout for GOP campaign that is supposedly in so much trouble.

It remains to be seen if her tough, small-town executive mom persona will connect with the swing voters the way I think it should. But overall I think it was a great night for a lot folks to tune into the GOP and catch something they may not have expected: a lot of humor, warmth and grit in the midst of so much hostile and dismissive editorial coverage. Hopefully they also caught some of Giuliani’s sublime smackdown just before it.

UPDATE: Apparently those numbers are only for the major commerical networks. Turns out both speeches atttracted more than 40 million viewers, when you include PBS and smaller cable networks.

I rarely agree with Bob Herbert, but the thrust of his op-ed in the NYT today was right on. If the Democrats aren’t careful, they can take the year Hillary almost won the nomination (and probably the White House) and use it to set the cause of women in politics back by a decade. The feeding frenzy on Sarah Palin has reached insane proportions. The NYT says that the revelation in the media that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant brings McCain’s vetting process into question. Some Dems have said that her family life is too complicated for her to be a good Vice President. Others have said that she was only picked because she’s a woman. The last two points should bring a shocked gasp to anyone who has followed the recent Democratic nomination campaigns. The world would have ended if anyone had said that Hillary was unfit because she’s a woman, which is what these attacks amount to. But Sarah Palin apparently isn’t a “woman” according to the meaning of the word in Democrat-land, because she’s a not a Democrat. “Female” is not apparently an anatomical issue, but a political one. And the glee with which Democratic women have felt free to lampoon Palin (“A Veep in Go-Go Boots…”) tells us more than anything else in this debate about where the Democrats really are on the role of women in politics—they’re fine as long as a) they agree with us, and b) they aren’t really women.

How does Hillary actually feel about all that, I wonder?

But the attack on McCain about Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy is the most unbelievable of all. To begin with, since when does the Democratic Party think that having a child become pregnant out of wedlock disqualifies someone for high office? From the standpoint of the religious right, one would think that the facts that she’s going to keep the child and marry the father are more important than the timing of its conception. But what does all this have to do with Sarah Palin’s fitness for the vice presidency? … We’re learning that being a woman isn’t about chromosomes. It’s about politics. The Democrats may think that they are hereby setting back the prospect of women’s progress only in the Republican Party, although why anyone should think that that’s o.k. is beyond me. But they’re wrong. In three days, the Democrats have established the precedent for belittling all professional women, using irrelevant family arguments to attack their ability to pursue traditionally male careers, and in general re-establishing the glass ceiling for all women. Will Hillary come to Sarah’s defense? Of course not. How sad [emphasis mine -- Dorrk].

But what if she did?

We all know that Hillary is bitter over her defeat to Obama and is likely contemplating how best to poise herself for a re-run in 2012. What if, a week after her speech in support of Obama at the Demo convention, Hillary came out strongly, indignantly against the treatment of Palin at the hands of the media? She could even mock Obama’s pathetic hollow faux-angry cry of “Enough!” during his acceptance speech, but Hillary would have genuine emotion and purpose behind hers, as she feels she was also badly handled by a press that was obviously biased against her from the start.

If Hillary came out this week with a public speech chastizing the Democratic and Media establishments for their rabid attacks on Sarah Palin, she would drop a major bombshell in this campaign that would shake the Democratic party while also providing her with a powerful Sister Souljah moment on which to launch her run for 2012.

It won’t happen. But if it did, it would be talked about for decades.