No, I didn’t watch all of the Vice Presidential debate last night. I watched for a while, what I saw confirmed what I had been expecting, I turned the set off, and I went to bed.
I had been expecting Sen. Joe Biden to behave like a senator, full of policy details and the facts to support them. I expected him to keep his cool and to avoid going after Gov. Sarah Palin too strenuously.
I had been expecting Sarah Palin to retain her composure and not fall on her face.
That will reassure partisans but is unlikely to convince anybody one way or another.
As an aside (and it’s something I’ve said before) I think that activist Democrats and Republicans tend to look for different things in candidates. Democrats tend to like a president with a complete command of the details who’ll manage every detail; Republicans tend to like a president who has a set of general principles and a staff to handle the details.
The last three Democrats elected to the presidency (Clinton, Carter, Johnson) certainly conform to that model as well as two of the last three Republicans (George W. Bush, Reagan).
Sen. Obama fits the model; Sen. McCain does, too, but is a little more of a policy wonk than either GWB or Reagan.
I continue to think that the vice presidential candidates are a sideshow and attacks on either vice presidential candidate are a waste of time and spit.
As usual Joe Gandelman has the best round-up of media and blogospheric reaction to the debate.
Of course they’re a sideshow. But sideshows can be the best part of the circus. Certainly worth some commentary.
You write:
“I had been expecting Sen. Joe Biden to behave like a senator, full of policy details and the facts to support them.”
So, have you gone back to look at the transcript? Especially at the “facts” Biden cited? Turns out many of them were not facts at all, including a number he appears to have made up on the spot! For that matter, his greatest free-wheeling was on foreign policy, his (supposed) area of expertise.
Examples:
– misrepresented McCain’s health care proposal by saying the $5,000 TAX credit (that is, more than enough money to off-set TAXES on average health-care benefits!) is meant to replace the $12,000 (employers’ average) health care benefit itself
– claimed McCain opposed Clinton on Bosnia, when in fact he supported him
– repeated (as expected) the claim that Obama never spoke of meeting with terrorist heads-of-state “without preconditions” (though he, with most of the Dem field, went after Obama at the time!)
– claimed General McKiernan said “surge principles” would not work in Afghanistan…. when he said the opposite
– said spending on Iraq for three weeks was equal to 7 1/2 worth in Afghanistan
– spoke of Pakistan’s nuclear missiles able to hit Israel (sorry, they’d fall 1000 miles short)
– claimed Obama made a significant bi-partisan contribution to Sen. Lugar’s work against nuclear proliferation, when the real work was done by Nunn-Lugar in 1991-3, years before Obama arrived (Obama added a minor amendment that had little to do with the main issue)
– INVENTED a story about kicking Hezbollah out of Lebanon…. (everyone seems unable to figure out what he might even be thinking of, so most of the media simply ignored it!!)
– accused McCain’s “deregulation” approach for causing the financial crisis, though the apparent piece of legislation he alludes to () was passed by a wide bi-partisan margin (including Biden himself!!) and had nothing to do with the subprime crisis (may even have helped delay it!), while on the other hand many Republicans (including McCain) DID seek greater OVERSIGHT for FreddieMac and Fannie Mae (whose failures ARE a major cause of the crisis) but were blocked by Democrats.
– implied McCain favored unrestricted “deregulation” of health-care, based on a clipped quote in which M was actually proposing that people be able to buy health-care from out-of-state providers (M did compare this to bank deregulation, but ONLY to one SPECIFIC and very SUCCESSFUL change)
(more – misrepresenting McCain and Obama’s positions [sometimes B’s own as well] as seen on FINAL votes on various bills concerning energy [esp on drilling], [raising] taxes, and troop funding)
Note that I am NOT including the issues of which policies are better or worse, nor even most of the misrepresentations (e.g., the insinuation that McCain was advocating a targeted tax-break for oil companies, when in fact, the tax break in question is equally applied to ALL businesses). Rather, it is about the basic “facts on the ground” and of who voted for or against what. (Odd thing, though, is that, if the facts ARE wrong, many of Biden’s efforts imply that the position McCain ACTUALLY holds is the better one, or at least a very reasonable one.)
I will give him a few breaks — SOME of the claims above are just repeating Obama’s own talking points.
COMPARISON with Palin — Yes, Palin included fewer facts, but hers were almost all correct or arguable! It’s also true that debates may be PERCEIVED as “won” by those who SEEM to cite the most facts with the most confidence. That’s fine for college debate competitions, but THESE debates are actually supposed to inform us about the candidates REAL positions, so we can decide between them. It’s very sad when one side and its media supporters have so little interest in that happening.