VP candidates play to strengths

Joe Biden managed to not look like a sexist jerk and had a sensitive moment in which he nearly broke out in tears. Sarah Palin stumbled on the word nuclear and said “maverick” close to a thousand times but came off fairly competent.

Yes, it looks like most of the pundits got this debate wrong. The candidates played mostly to their strengths – Biden seemed articulate and knowledgeable, Palin seemed folksy and sometimes down to earth.

The debate opened with brief economic questions. Palin slammed Biden for claiming that paying taxes was “patriotic” (while dodging a question about deregulation). She also repeated the same false claim John McCain made about Barack Obama raising taxes on Americans who make as little as $42,000 a year.

The debate moved away from the economy pretty quickly, which was a blessing given how few constructive things Obama and McCain said about the financial crisis in their last debate.

Both vice-presidential candidates tried to assure the audience that their presidential partners were leaders in resolving the financial crisis. None of us really bought it.

Some were impressed by the candidates’ solidarity on taking real action in Darfur – even if we were a little skeptical about that ever happening. When it came to the “war on terror,” the candidates got bogged down in the same arguments about troop funding and diplomacy with Iran.

Biden was confident in his knowledge of policy and tended to defend himself better than Obama had. He pointed out that technically, McCain had voted to raise taxes 477 times and explained how McCain had voted the same on the bill that would have supposedly raised taxes on the $42,000-a-year income bracket.

Palin, in general, performed competently. Far from the nervous performance she gave during the Katie Couric interviews, she kept up with Biden and managed to seem somewhat empathetic.

Biden ended up making a ridiculous comment about spending “a lot of time in Home Depot.” He couldn’t outdo small-town Palin.

Still, policy is more important than show. Almost all of us agreed that Biden knew his stuff, even if a few of us were worried about his answer about voting to make bankruptcy more difficult.

We still had doubts about Palin. Yet, because of all the media hype about her possibly stumbling, she may have won the debate in the eyes of plenty of Americans.