A Political Debate With Two Scorecards

"She utterly held her own," said Fox's Bill Kristol.

Robert Thompson, a professor of pop culture at Syracuse University, says the media assessments are "incredibly impressionistic."

"The criteria for success for Palin was, don't sound like Tina Fey and don't get into a situation in which it appears you're incredibly intellectually shallow. She did that, and everyone's saying it was a triumph." For Biden, Thompson says, the media mandate was "don't say those sentences with 5,000 semicolons and no period."

Columnists and bloggers tended to divide along partisan lines in analyzing the stylistic clash. Palin would have been able to claim victory "unless she had vomited or fainted on-air," the New Republic's Michelle Cottle said on MSNBC.

National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez praised Palin's folksy style, adding: "Is that fair? Is that being patronizing to a chick? Not if that chick proves to be a pit bull with lipstick."

Much of the commentary beyond the New York-Washington corridor was mildly positive toward the Republican nominee. The Houston Chronicle said "Palin was poised and disciplined after a series of shaky performances on TV news interviews." The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called it "a solid, if not brilliantly substantive, performance in a showing that could go a long way toward answering some of the questions that have sprung up recently about her competence."

Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley found her channeling Ross Perot: "Palin was short a few charts, graphs and facts. But, oh, who cares when she says things like 'Darn right, it was the predator lenders' whose greed caused the current economic crisis."

Some reviews were sharply negative. The Los Angeles Times editorial page said Palin "did nothing to arrest her slide from phenomenon to embarrassment." Des Moines Register columnist David Yepsen wrote that Palin's answers "lacked coherence at times. When she couldn't answer a question, she fell back on a chatty, unfocused repetition of the talking points she had memorized."

In one respect, gender differences were impossible to ignore. The debate's most emotional moment came when Biden choked up while recalling the 1972 car accident that killed his wife and daughter. If Palin had struggled with her composure, as Hillary Clinton did at a New Hampshire coffee shop during the primaries, wouldn't that have dominated the post-game punditry?

"We think it's wonderful coming from a man, and 'typical female' coming from a woman," Rooney says.