Sarah Palin, unfiltered, more than held her own on the national debate stage last night. She was folksy and charming and delivered her lines, even the stock ones, with conviction and brio.
On style and charm and connecting with viewers at home, the newcomer seemed to have it all over Joe Biden, the veteran pol who dared to be boring at the outset and took quite a while to warm up. Palin locked into the camera lens from the start and never let go, wriggling her nose to take the edge off her sharpest lines.
Biden may have had the stronger arguments, in terms of substance and political advantage, at least at this point in the campaign.
Importantly, he avoided the worst mistakes that could have cost him dearly. He wasn't overbearing, arrogant or a wise guy, and he kept his focus on John McCain, not Palin, his embattled rival.
Both candidates summoned up the ghost of Ronald Reagan to make their most effective pitches.
Biden borrowed Reagan's "Are you better off" question, used with devastating impact in the 1980 campaign to oust an unpopular White House incumbent. Biden employed it to carry out the Democrats' main mission - tying economic misery on Main Street to the Republican in the White House and linking it to his own middle-class, Mid-Atlantic roots.
"Ask anybody in there whether or not the economic and foreign policy of this administration has made them better off in the last eight years. And then ask them whether there's a single major initiative that John McCain differs with the president on. On taxes, on Iraq, on Afghanistan, on the whole question of how to help education, on the dealing with health care," he said. "The people in my neighborhood, they get it. They get it. They know they've been getting the short end of the stick. ... The wealthy have done very well. Corporate America has been rewarded. It's time we change it. Barack Obama will change it."
Palin shot right back with a line, clearly scripted in advance for maximum Reaganesque impact, that may have been her best moment of the night.
"Ah, say it ain't so, Joe; there you go again, pointing backwards again," the Alaska governor remarked, managing to merge Ronald Reagan's most famous debate one-liner with the remark that a shoeshine boy supposedly made to Shoeless Joe Jackson during the Black Sox scandal of the early 20th century.
