A Political Debate With Two Scorecards

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 4, 2008

From the barking heads to the boisterous bloggers, from the Beltway elite to the heartland newspapers, a grand consensus quickly emerged about Sarah Palin's debate performance: She wasn't awful.

In fact, the opinion-mongers said, she was poised, charming and sooo much better than she had been in her interviews with Katie Couric that there almost seemed to be a collective sigh of disappointment at the absence of a train wreck. Couric set the tone on CBS by declaring seconds after the veep debate ended Thursday night that the Republican governor of Alaska "did not embarrass herself" against Sen. Joe Biden.

Why, then, did the quickie polls say Biden had won handily?

"Biden is clearly so much more knowledgeable, by a factor of about a million," says analyst Charlie Cook, a former high school debater. "But the expectations were that Biden would mop her up. The expectations for Palin were so low that she knocked it out of the ballpark. She was getting downright sassy."

How is it that one candidate gets to be judged by an artificial benchmark created by the very media "filter" that Palin criticized in the debate? That, says Time correspondent Karen Tumulty, explains the gap between the pundits and the people.

"People out there are watching and trying to imagine her as vice president and even president," Tumulty says. "With the media, we've been so obsessed with parsing and flyspecking these interviews the last few weeks. To compare her to a series of interviews in which she didn't do very well is not only a very low bar, it's not the way the rest of the country is looking at it."

Several journalists say moderator Gwen Ifill, whose objectivity had been challenged by conservatives because she is writing a book about Barack Obama and other black politicians, was eminently fair. But Cook says she was "lobbing softballs," and others say the PBS correspondent's lack of follow-up questions -- the kind that tripped up Palin in television interviews -- let both candidates skate. For instance, Ifill posed a general question about climate change rather than asking about Palin's past statements that human activity is not the cause.

"With so many questions raised about 'gotcha' journalism, largely by the McCain campaign, Gwen Ifill was never going to make those kinds of questions the substance of the debate," says Emily Rooney, the host of "Beat the Press" on Boston's WGBH-TV.

Palin criticized Couric's selection of questions yesterday in explaining why she looked uncomfortable. "The Sarah Palin in those interviews was a little bit annoyed," she told Fox News. "It's like, man, no matter what you say, you are going to get clobbered. If you choose to answer a question, you are going to get clobbered on the answer. If you choose to try to pivot and go to another subject that you believe that Americans want to hear about, you get clobbered for that, too."

On paper, the Democratic senator from Delaware scored more debating points in St. Louis. Palin frequently declined to respond to his criticisms of her running mate, John McCain, or the Bush administration's record, other than to accuse Biden of looking "backwards." She declared upfront that she wasn't necessarily going to answer Ifill's questions. And with her "darn right" and "doggone it" talk about "Joe Six-Pack," she smiled and winked her way to lots of positive reviews.

"Sarah Palin didn't freeze, she didn't make any major mistakes," said ABC's George Stephanopoulos.

"She's stopped that bleeding," said NBC's Andrea Mitchell.

"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.