McCain Swings for the Fences with October Surprise

The five-run homer gambit (the Palin selection) didn’t work. But now McCain may have hit on a winning strategy: exposing how Barack “Lefty” Obama’s rank hypocrisy may endanger the integrity of our National Pastime:

Standing just miles north of Philadelphia, whose Phillies will represent the National League starting Wednesday against the American League champion Tampa Bay Rays, McCain noted Obama has identified himself with both teams while campaigning in their two politically important home states.

Obama said over the weekend in Philadelphia that while he was a Chicago fan, “Since the White Sox are out of it, I’ll root for the Phillies now.” On Monday in Tampa, Obama was introduced by a Rays pitcher and said, “I’ve said from the beginning that I am a unity candidate, bringing people together. So when you see a White Sox Fan showing love to the Rays — and the Rays showing some love back — you know we are on to something right here.”

McCain told employees at TCI Millwork Inc. in Bensalem: “Now, I’m not dumb enough to get mixed up in a World Series between swing states. But I think I may have detected a little pattern with Sen. Obama. It’s pretty simple really. When he’s campaigning in Philadelphia, he roots for the Phillies, and when he’s campaigning in Tampa Bay, he `shows love’ to the Rays.”

That’ll work. I’m still planning to vote for McCain, but man, I’m getting tired of him. And now it turns out that the RNC has spent $150,000 on clothing and accessories (presumably including lipstick) for his running mate.

Can we please just have the election already, so Mr. Obama can start planning his transition?

Postscript

I finally read the WSJ “Liberal Supermajority” editorial that Pete told me about. It was OK. Because it covered so many issues, it couldn’t really do much in the way of persuasion on any given issue — each section seems to start out assuming that the reader already understands and agrees with the editorial board’s position.

In the section on health insurance, committed conservatives and long-time WSJ readers will see the term “single-payer” and think “socialism – bad.” But I remember the first time I ever heard the term single-payer… I thought whoo hooo! No need for multiple claim forms!

My BFF "Pete Robinson" (Unwittingly) Helps Me Shill For My Consulting Business

As I write these opening words, it’s a little after 2 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, October 17. I mention this by way of setting up a whiny rant about how hard it is for a new blogger to get noticed.

There’s an editorial [free link] titled “A Liberal Supermajority” in today’s WSJ [today’s!! I’m on top of this!!] providing what may be the most deeply-informed, tightly-argued description of the consequences of an Obama victory. Marshalling fact after fact, deploying beautiful, lean, unfussy prose, the editorial explains why such a sweeping Democratic victory would do grave and lasting damage to the Republic.

How do I know this? Oh, I read about it in a blog post in The Corner by former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson, who now is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. [He actually wrote the eloquent words that make up the meat of the prior paragraph — I used his words without quote marks to make a point, but I’m disclosing the deception in the same post. If I were Catholic, that would be one Hail Mary, one Our Father.] Mr. Robinson’s description was posted less than half an hour [half an hour!!] before I started writing.

Pete [Hey, we’ve never met, but can I call you Pete? I could have written, “Pete Robinson nails it when he describes today’s WSJ editorial,” pretending like we’re BFFs and all, but with my luck it would turn out that your REAL friends call you Peter.] Let me switch to third-person and start again.

Mr. Robinson, who turns out to have been born just one year before me [so maybe it WOULDN’T be unthinkable that I could call him Pete some day!! Unless he goes by Peter] , is a person of substance — beyond just the long-ago credential of having written speeches for President Reagan. [Hey, *I* wrote speeches for a President, too!! OK, I wrote speeches for Dan Tully, who in the 1990s was President (later Chairman) and CEO of a once-iconic securities firm that is being swallowed up by Bank of America. But dammit, he WAS a President.] Seriously, he’s worth listening to — I’ve watched several of Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge interview segments. They’re quite good, and he has a knack for setting up commentary in an evocative way.

So when Pete told me [OK, I read it in The Corner — this interior dialogue is in danger of becoming tedious] that this is a Pulitzer-worthy editorial, I knew I had to read it right away. Right after I knock out this “quick” blog post. [Damn, I hope it really is a good editorial… otherwise I’m going to look silly.] Maybe THIS will be the blog post that gets me my first InstaLaunch! [Google it your own damn self.]

Uh oh… it just dawned on me that if Mr. Robinson has had time to write an evocative post for The Corner, other bloggers may also have seen the editorial, and have sucked all of the oxygen out of the blogosphere already. Let me get one of my 20-something assistants to do a little research. [Oops, the assistants were on standby back when I worked for a New York PR agency — they commanded salaries in the “mid-five-figures,” (in NYC!!) far more than I can pay now, even in Jersey.] OK, I’ll do my own research.

It turns out that when I started writing this at 2:09 p.m. [the lying Blogger timestamp, below, uselessly records when you start typing, not when you post], there were 93 blog posts about “A Liberal Supermajority”. [There will be more by now if you follow this link.] And, there were more than 400 moderated comments on the WSJ article itself, a number that also will have grown by the time you follow this link. [The WSJ comments app is not paging properly, but there are 14 comments on a page, and there were 29 pages when I checked — do the math if you think I might be winging it. “Moderated,” BTW, means that a person in NYC making mid-five-figures has glanced at each and every comment to make sure it doesn’t misspell “fuck” in a headline. Sorry for dropping the f-bomb without warning in a previously PG-rated blog, but it evokes an old copy desk saying I made up more than 20 years ago while I was on a copy desk, and it would lose verisimilitude [look it up] if I went with f***.] So it looks like my 15 hits of blogger fame will have to wait for another day.

Time to wrap this up. [I can hear you now, mocking me… “wassamatta, Kirk, you’ve got all this time to blog because things are a little slow with your consulting business?” Hm… Are you asking that because I might be able to help your company or organization meet your communications needs?] Besides, it’s almost time for dinner — right after I read the WSJ editorial.

Joe the Plumber Becomes Collateral Damage


Obama talks with Joe Wurzelbacher, who should not have had any reason to fear that his life was about to change.
(Photo: Jae C. Hong / AP)

The snap judgment about Wednesday night’s Presidential debate, according to headlines all over the Internets, was that “the big winner of the debate was Joe the Plumber.” The line brought a smile to my face, and I daydreamed about how he could build a marketing campaign around it.

Not so fast.

HOLLAND, Ohio — Joe the Plumber’s story sprang a few leaks Thursday.

Turns out that the man who was held up by John McCain as the typical, hard-working American taxpayer isn’t really a licensed plumber. And court documents show he owes nearly $1,200 in back taxes.

“Joe,” whose name is Samuel J. Wurzelbacher…

The implication here is, this guy lied about being a plumber, he’s a tax cheat, and his name isn’t even Joe. I’ll be damned before I’ll post any links to the left-wing fever swamps (or the right-wing fever swamps, for that matter), but if you search for a bit you’ll find all of these allegations and more, stated explicitly. The reality, of course, is much more nuanced, and you can find those details elsewhere.

My point here is that this feeding frenzy is the blogospheric equivalent of a rapist’s defense attorney grilling the victim about her sex life on the stand.

An unidentified emailer on The Corner summed it up better than I can:

That said, the way the pro-Obama media and bloggers, and Obama himself, have responded to Joe has got me nearly shaking with rage. They are attempting to destroy a man — a private citizen — who had the audacity to ask The One a question. Mind you, Joe was on his front lawn playing football with his son when Obama strolled up to give him his hopenchange spiel. Obama approached Joe, not the other way around. And Joe asked Obama an honest question. And Obama gave him an honest — and very, very revealing — answer. Again, mind you, the embarassment was on Obama’s end, not Joe’s. It wasn’t a gotcha question.

And yet, for that Joe is being pilloried, every aspect of his private and professional life being sorted through and exposed.

It wasn’t a gotcha question, but to be clear, it certainly was a challenging question. It was the kind of question an ordinary citizen might ask if he’s trying to decide which candidate to support. It was the kind of question candidates ought to hear. If McCain had strolled up to Wurzelbacher’s front lawn, Joe might have asked, “is Sarah Palin really ready on Day One to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency while we’re fighting two wars?”

Through absolutely no fault of his own, “Joe the Plumber” was mentioned 11 times during the debate (if I remember correctly from something I surfed past and can’t find right now). And what was the result?

Reporters camped out by his house overnight and by midmorning there were 21 people on his driveway surrounding him, holding cameras and notebooks.

Thought experiment: Is there any aspect of your life that you would prefer not to have to explain and defend to reporters on your driveway? Yes, I’m talking about that incidentthat one, right there. [Me? I’ve got a whole menu of choices.]

Because of that incident, you know better than to run for President — or, if you’re running for President, you’ve had plenty of time to think about how to explain away that incident.

But it turns out that if you truly want to safeguard yourself and your family, you’d better not have the audacity to question The One.

Update from the Comments: SuDoNum said [in response to another commenter]I am a small government, low tax, personal freedom/responsibility conservative. What this administration has done in the last 7 years is a travesty. Torturing US Citizens? You condone that under any circumstances? BS, I don’t care what crime you have or may have committed, if you are a US citizen you are entitled to all the rights provided under the Constitution.

It’s pointless to debate you. Arguing over the internet is an exercise in futility. My advice to you and all “conservatives” is quit making excuses for the impending avalanche. We are reaping what we sowed.

Chris said… Obama’s “spread the wealth around” slip still stands. Although Obama’s fans in the media and on forums worldwide tried to bury it with “Joe’s not a plumber and he doesn’t pay his taxes” tabloid fodder, that one comment keeps popping up, haunting the biggest socialist to have a good chance at the White House since FDR….

We already have too much socialism in our system. We don’t deserve to “reap” more, regardless of anything the current administration has done.

Stick a Fork in Mac, He’s Toast

Something not quite right metaphorically in that headline, but I’m too tired to figure it out.

To win, Obama needed to refrain from burning an American flag onstage, and he more than met that challenge. He looked more Presidential than McCain. I’m trying as hard as I can to find reasons to stay on the McCain bandwagon, but when he gave that sarcastic “I got it” smirk at the end of the discussion on vouchers, I wanted to slap him. He also didn’t help himself by mocking Obama’s eloquence — even though he was making the valid point that Obama’s willingness to “look at” offshore drilling was a form of weasel-wording.

I was astonished that neither candidate directly addressed the Palin issue in response to Bob Schieffer’s question about whether the respective VP candidates are ready to serve as President — and Schieffer didn’t follow up. McCain convinced me that he’s proud of Palin, but didn’t claim she is ready to serve. Obama could have gallantly confined himself to saying he thinks Biden is more qualified, but he didn’t even do that — he spun off on a tangent about funding for autism.

I didn’t see the point of McCain coming back to bang on Congressman Lewis again after already making his point once. McCain has a legitimate grievance about Lewis’s remarks, but it’s hard to see how that helps him. And Ayers still is not a five-run homer.

I liked McCain’s jibe near the beginning that if Obama wanted to run against George Bush, he should have run four years ago. But it was all downhill from there.

A Surprise: Hitchens Endorses Obama

Christopher Hitchens, by far the biggest Iraq War hawk on the nominal Left, has endorsed Obama for President. I have to say I was stunned to see it. Three weeks ago, Hitch’s Slate column was headlined: “Is Obama Another Dukakis? Why is Obama So Vapid, Hesitant and Gutless?”

Does Hitchens now plan to wear a button saying “Vote for the Gutless One”?

I do not, btw, subscribe to the idea that Obama is “gutless.” I’ve tried very hard on this blog to be respectful of people with whom I disagree, including especially Obama. This is in part because I know many Obama supporters whom I deeply respect, my wife being first among them. When I’m critical of Obama, I try to base it on policies rather than on personality, and avoid name-calling. [Interior dialog: Didn’t you just call Jeremiah Wright “an anti-American racist”? Well, yes, I suppose I did. I’ll stand behind that… if Wright were on the verge of becoming President, I’d try to develop a more nuanced opinion of him.]

I generally admire Hitchens’s writing, despite (not because of) his tendency to hurl epithets at people (then endorse them three weeks later). And his reasoning here resonates with me to some extent, although I think he overstates his case:

The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: “What does he take me for?” Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party’s right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama’s position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.

It therefore seems to me that the Republican Party has invited not just defeat but discredit this year, and that both its nominees for the highest offices in the land should be decisively repudiated, along with any senators, congressmen, and governors who endorse them.

But how does Hitch, champion of both the war and the surge from their respective beginnings, reconcile himself to endorsing a candidate who opposed both? Here’s his ringing summation:

I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that “issue” I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience.

Well, I hope he’s right about profiting from experience. His formulation here is interesting — “the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one.” Biden voted in favor of the Iraq War, and Obama has certainly moderated his anti-war rhetoric in recent months, so I guess you can say the “Obama-Biden ticket” is not capitulationist. But capitulationism — which I define here as “get out of Iraq regardless of consequence” — was one of the core tenets of the Obama campaign during the primaries, and the reason I preferred Hillary Clinton over Obama.

The Allure of Going Nuclear in the Late Innings

Losing the Presidential race has to be even worse than losing the World Series.

If you lose the World Series, you at least get to put up a banner proclaiming that you were the League Champion for the year. Your hometown throws you a consolation rally, and you start talking about the future (“hey, we’re tied for 1st place” in the coming season). There may be regrets about missed opportunities that could have produced World Series rings, but your own fans probably will not vilify you.

McCain, however, can already hear the long knives being sharpened on his own side of the aisle. (Oops, wrong metaphor.) McCain knows the throw is going to beat him to the bag, but he has to be seen running it out just as hard as he can. This is the big leagues.

Set aside ideology and partisanship for a moment and reflect on the momentous achievements of these two men, McCain and Obama. Think about how much they had to go through to get to where they are today. Neither one was given much of a chance coming out of Spring Training. From the Nov. 7, 2007 WSJ:

Democrats enter the 2008 presidential race with powerful political advantages, but face a tough and unpredictable battle because of the vulnerabilities of front-runner Hillary Clinton. … She’s locked in a dead heat against leading Republican candidate Rudolph Giuliani.

(Wow… remember Rudy Giuliani? But I digress.)

Flash-forward to October 2008. Now it’s getting late in the World Series, and McCain is badly behind. Real Clear Politics shows eight states as tossups (CO, FL, IN, MO, NC, NV, OH, WV). Even if McCain wins every single one of them, he comes up short of the 270 electoral votes he needs, unless he also can turn a blue state red. In baseball terms, McCain has made it to Game Seven of the World Series, but he’s down by five runs and he’s got nobody on base. It’s not the 9th inning yet, but it’s getting late in the game.

So he tries to hit a five-run homer. “Hey, let’s pick that hot Alaska governess for VP.” (Note to the beautiful blonde I’m proud to call my wife: This isn’t me talking, Sweetie — I’m channeling McCain.) “That’ll shake things up and energize the base.” He knew Palin’s national credentials were thin (to put it charitably), but there was no way to predict she would become such a target-rich environment for Tina Fey.

That move didn’t work out, and now it really is late in the game. He’s got his ace starter warming up in the bullpen on two days rest. He tries to bunt for a base hit with two outs, desperate to do something to get a base runner. Et cetera, et cetera — I don’t want to get overly tedious about matching baseball moves with specific McCain tactics, but I’m talking here about things like “suspending” the campaign, and announcing a half-baked, buy-individual-mortgages proposal in the second debate.

What do you do now, Mr. World Class Athlete who has come so far? This ain’t no basketball game, where the last few minutes turn into garbage time when the game is out of reach. It’s still theoretically possible to win until the final out.

“I know! Let’s go nuclear with Ayers, Rezko and Wright! Maybe that will take voters’ minds off of their 201Ks. It’s a long shot, but it’s all we’ve got.”

Now, let me be clear. I think Obama has made some appalling choices in associates over the years, and calling attention to those choices is a very legitimate campaign issue. As the indispensable Charles Krauthammer puts it, the most disturbing thing…

… is the window these associations give on Obama’s core beliefs. He doesn’t share Rev. Wright’s poisonous views of race nor Ayers’ views, past and present, about the evil that is American society. But Obama clearly did not consider these views beyond the pale. For many years he swam easily and without protest in that fetid pond.

“Fetid pond” is a nice touch. But while this is a legitimate issue, it’s not a five-run homer — and meanwhile, McCain has his Keating Five baggage.

I fear that McCain and the Republicans, in their understandable desperation, are going to ratchet up the negativity at the very time that people like me, who favor McCain despite his flaws, are trying to reconcile ourselves to Obama, despite his flaws.

I’m trying to reconcile myself because it’s clear to me that McCain is toast. Yes, it’s theoretically possible to come back when you’re down by five runs with two outs and nobody on in the bottom of the ninth. And monkeys might fly out of my butt. (Crude perhaps, but I gotta come up with something to compete with “fetid pond”.)

The economic crisis is driving votes to the Democrats. That may not be fair or logical, but it’s a fact. And the only thing that could possibly knock the financial crisis off the front page between now and Election Day would be an Unspeakable Event that I most fervently do not want, and that no loyal American wants. If such an event were to occur, it is not clear to me which way the votes would shift.

Going negative can be effective at the margins, but it will backfire if the Republicans take it too far. Ayers is an unrepentant terrorist, but Obama is not. Rezko is a criminal, but Obama is not. Wright is an anti-American racist, but Obama is not. Obama also is not a Muslim or a Marxist or a Manchurian Candidate, and however fervently some people may believe those things about him, the umpires are not going to be convinced.

Out of all the people who have any conceivable chance of winning the election next month, Obama to my mind is the second-best choice. I have serious qualms about him, but there is an upside as well, and I have no doubt the Republic will survive an Obama Presidency.

To paraphrase the best thing Al Gore ever said, during extra innings in December 2000, “if at the end of the day, [Obama] is sworn in as President, then he’ll be my President. He’ll be America’s President.” To which I would add, let’s treat the man with the respect the office deserves.

In Defense of "Wall Street Greed"

The titans of Wall Street gathered this morning at the NYSE to discuss the ongoing crisis. The writeup of the gathering in the WSJ Deal Journal blog is well worth reading, once you get past the inexplicable opening links to poetry and “Error 404”. (Blogging famously involves publishing without an editor, and here we see the downside.)

I liked this bit from the Q&A:

The first question is a great one: the questioner notes that the four candidates for president and vice president rarely say “Wall Street” without also saying “greed and corruption.” Which is funny because, you know, it’s Washington.

Now, I’m as opposed to Wall Street corruption as the next fella, but Wall Street greed has gotten a bad rap. Whenever I hear the word greed, my mind substitutes “self-actualization.” “Greed” is too often conflated with simply acting in one’s own self-interest — the wonderfully relentless force of nature that underpins capitalism and makes it possible. (I’m a big fan of capitalism — one of God’s greatest gifts to humanity, and the only truly moral economic system — but more about that another time.)

The present unpleasantness is the result of a bursting bubble of housing prices. The prices were driven up because over the years, more and more capital was allocated to housing stock. If society is going to build more housing, it needs people to live in that housing, so the joys of homeownership were extended well beyond the pool of people who could actually, you know, afford to own a home.

The mechanism for this was the securitization of mortgages, through which Wall Street took risky loans off the books of banks and sold them to investors around the world — thereby seemingly making the risk disappear by distributing it widely. The housing bubble would not have been possible without the existence of mortgage-backed securities, an invention that served as a cash cow for Wall Street for many years.

So greedy Wall Street is at fault, right? Well, no. Wall Street did what Wall Street does, which is to find a way to distribute risk, while raking a little off the top of each transaction, thank you very much. But Wall Street didn’t create the risk. The gummint did — with the best of intentions. Roger Kimball describes the process as well as I’ve seen it described. An excerpt:

* The original Community Reinvestment Act was signed into law in 1977 by Jimmy Carter. Its purpose, in a nutshell, was to require banks to provide credit to “under-served populations,” i.e., those with poor credit.

The buzz word was “affordable mortgages,” e.g., mortgages with low teaser-rates, which required the borrower to put no money down, which required the borrower to pay only the interest for a set number of years, etc.

* In 1995, Bill Clinton’s administration made various changes to the CRA, increasing “access to mortgage credit for inner city and distressed rural communities,” i.e., it provided for the securitization, i.e. public underwriting, of what everyone now calls “sub-prime mortgages.”

Bottom line? It forced banks to issue $1 trillion in sub-prime mortgages. $1 trillion, i.e., a thousand billion dollars in sub-prime, i.e., risky, mortgages, in order to push this latest example of social engineering.

But wait: how did it force banks to do this? Easy. Introduce a federal requirement that banks make the loans or face penalties.

Emphasis added.

All of this explains why it’s deeply ironic that the crisis apparently is benefiting the Democrats. Maybe it’s only natural to blame the incumbent party for any economic debacle. But in this case, as Kimball documents, the Bush administration and John McCain are on record as having raised alarm bells years ago about the gathering mortgage crisis, while Democrats in Congress stifled attempts to do anything that would cut off the flow of capital to provide home ownership for people who could not afford it.

Good luck, President Obama. And I mean that sincerely. For all of our sakes.

McCain’s Town Hall "Advantage"

Before the debate, we heard a lot about how good McCain is in a town hall format. There wasn’t much evidence of that last night. Time’s Swampland does a good job of explaining why:

In the classic McCain town hall, differences of opinion are expressed, and McCain works to build a conversation, so that everyone develops respect for him and each other, even if there is disagreement. In this debate, McCain was trying to convince voters and the audience that Obama was not worthy. So there was a stilted element to the affair. Finally, the key to the classic McCain town hall is that McCain is having fun. He did not appear to be having fun tonight. Obama, meanwhile, did not seem interested in having fun. He was there to make his case, and he did it clearly.

I’m starting to get used to the idea of President Obama. The economic crisis seems to have sealed McCain’s fate, even though he’s the one who warned two years ago about the problems of Fannie and Freddie, while the Democrats were saying everything was fine. After eight years of spending increases, the Republicans have squandered their reputation for greater financial responsibility.

I’m just grateful that Obama was not President in 2007. By the time he takes office, it looks like it will be too late to surrender in Iraq. Once it becomes Mr. Obama’s war, I doubt he’ll be eager to lose a war that is being won.

Notes on the Palin-Palin Debate

Here are some observations on last night’s debate that resonate with me.

Time’s report card on Palin (both candidates got an overall “B”):

By the standards of those Americans conditioned by the late night comics to think of Palin as an inarticulate idiot, incapable of putting coherent sentences together or understanding basic policy questions, she succeeded enormously. She had a solid ninety minutes of rapid, confident discourse and kept herself from being the story of the night (as well as the constant punch line of the election season). Improved her image and partially turned the page on McCain’s bad two weeks, enabling the Republican ticket team to try to regain some footing in a contest that has been steadily slipping away-but didn’t revolutionize the current race. Kicked off the debate with a demure handshake and query for Biden (“Hey, can I call you Joe?”) and indulged in some winks and folksy asides (referring to Washington insiders as “guys” for instance) but otherwise, didn’t leave Tina Fey much to work with.

Neo-neocon thinks Sarahcudda needs a live audience to thrive:

Some athletes are known for raising the level of their game when it is most important, in the championship or the World Series or the Olympics. Some are notorious for shining during the season but folding in the big ones.

Palin’s convention speech was a crucial debut in her rookie year, much like pitching in the season opener before the largest audience of her life. The Biden debate was more like stepping to the mound in the eighth inning of the World Series with bases loaded and nobody out, with her team behind. With most of America watching, she struck out the side.

That doesn’t mean her team will win, however. There’s still at least another inning to go, and she’s not the closer.

In contrast, Palin’s interviews with Gibson and Couric put her off her game. There was no audience present; it had to be imagined and filled in later. Since Palin seems to be most at ease and even invigorated interacting with a real crowd, this may have been part of the reason for her unease in the interviews. In her speeches and in the debate she was especially effective when she addressed the people directly.

From an astute commenter at Hot Air (via Neo-neocon):

We all know this was not the Palin/Biden debate. This was the Palin/Palin debate. Everybody who tuned into this thing, whether liberal, moderate or conservative were tuned in to see which candidate Sarah Palin handed the live hand grenade to, Obama or McCain. As usual nobody gived a rats a** what nonsense spewed from Biden’s cakehole. Nobody will remember a thing he said.

From Ross Douthat:

The Democrats have a lot of built-in advantages in this election cycle, and judging by the public’s reaction to the first debate, the key to victory for Obama-Biden is to do no harm – don’t squander your advantages, don’t freak out when the Republicans score their points on the surge and offshore drilling, and just be sure to always nudge the conversation back to the economy, to middle-class tax cuts versus tax cuts for the rich, to health care, and to George W. Bush’s record. So while Sarah Palin did an awful lot for Sarah Palin tonight, there was only so much she could do for her running mate – given her own limits, but especially given the state of the country, and the gulf between the issues the McCain campaign wants to fight on and the issues voters care about. She’s saved herself from Quayle-dom, but Obama-Biden is one debate closer to victory.

That last sentence sums it up pretty well, I think. The other day, my wife Nina came up with the line, “I can see the end of Palin’s career from my house” — a line which I grudgingly admire, even though I wish Palin well. But after last night I’m hopeful that Palin may still have a political future. I disagree with her on social issues and I don’t think she’s qualified to be vice president, but I admire her for taking on a remarkably corrupt Alaska political establishment, ousting a sitting governor of her own party in the process.

She’s in over her head, but she deserves better than the treatment she’s received. Ironically her best hope for better treatment is to lose the election. Who would remember Dan Quayle’s campaign-trail mishaps if he had never been elected VP?