Palin Digs Herself Out

Even if expectations hadn't been in the basement, Sarah Palin did quite well last night.

Darn right, as she kept saying.

Yes, she failed to respond to Joe Biden's charge that McCain kept pushing deregulation as Wall Street spun out of control. Instead, she switched to a talking point about how she cut taxes as mayor of Wasilla.

Yes, she wasn't adept enough to parry many of the senator's policy points.

Yes, she couldn't come up with any proposal she'd scale back in light of the Wall Street meltdown ("How long have I been at this, like, five weeks?" Like, yeah.)

Yes, she faltered on foreign affairs, and the best she could do when Biden accused the administration of a disastrous policy toward Israel was to complain that the Democratic ticket "constantly looked backward."

But the main point is, she was a thousand times better than she had been with Katie Couric. She seemed poised, she smiled a lot and looked at her opponent (unlike McCain last week). She started out talking about soccer parents worried about the economy ("I betcha you're gonna hear some fear") and went on to pitch herself to "Joe Sixpack."

Biden may have outdebated her on the details of McCain's health plan and on Mideast policy. But Palin had examples -- examples! -- of such matters as McCain's health credit and Obama's tax and energy votes. Bottom line: She sounded more knowledgeable than the woman who couldn't tell Couric a Supreme Court ruling she disagreed with.

In a normal debate, I'd say Biden won. But Sarah Palin didn't need to beat Joe Biden. She just needed to erase the scattered, deer-in-the-headlights image of herself created by the Katie and Charlie interviews. And by any fair-minded analysis, she went a long way toward doing that.

Palin ignored some of Gwen Ifill's questions, but debaters are allowed to do that. Biden scored when Palin tried to sidestep her past questioning of global warming as caused by man ("I don't want to argue about the causes") by noting the obvious: You can't come up with a solution unless you know whether human activity is the culprit.

Biden scored again when the governor said it would be a "travesty" to leave Eye-raq when victory is close, and he responded: "I didn't hear a plan." Will voters buy Palin's description of Obama's withdrawal strategy as a "white flag of surrender" and her argument that Obama voted against funding the troops? Biden rebutted the latter pretty well by citing a similar vote by McCain when a Democratic timetable was involved.

Palin let many of Biden's McCain-is-just-like-Bush attacks go unanswered, but that was clearly her strategy.