Steve Skojec

Pundits are weighing in.

Peggy Noonan gushes:

She killed. She had him at “Nice to meet you. Hey, can I call you Joe?” She was the star. He was the second male lead, the good-natured best friend of the leading man. She was not petrified but peppy.

[snip]

The heart of her message was a complete populist pitch. “Joe Six-Pack” and “soccer moms” should unite to fight the tormentors who forced mortgages on us. She spoke of “Main Streeters like me.” A question is at what point shiny, happy populism becomes cheerful manipulation.

Sarah Palin saved John McCain again Thursday night. She is the political equivalent of cardiac paddles: Clear! Zap! We’ve got a beat! She will re-electrify the base. More than that, an hour and a half of talking to America will take her to a new level of stardom. Watch her crowds this weekend. She’s about to get jumpers, the old political name for people who are so excited to see you they start to jump.

Rod Dreher isn’t so sure:

In a seemingly self-contradictory column, Peggy Noonan raves about how great Palin was last night, but then crawls McCain’s backside over phony populism.

[snip]

Noonan seems to think that Palin’s populism is authentic, and I suspect she’s right — but only populism as a matter of style. Noonan talks in her column about how extraordinarily serious the present moment is for our country — unprecedented, even — but I don’t see how she squares that observation with giving Palin a pass for her upbeat performance. As I said below, I thought Palin really suffered by comparison to Biden in discussing foreign policy. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and while she avoided gibbering, I found her reliance on talking points, and accusing Biden of counseling “surrender,” to be more than a little maddening.

A friend writes this morning that he can’t believe after watching Palin last night flail on foreign policy, that I still have doubts as to whether she’s capable of governing. Her foreign policy mediocrity is even more important, he points out:

And this is crucial because in domestic policy, the President governs collaboratively with Congress whereas in foreign policy the Executive Branch is largely a law unto itself.Yeah. It is very, very hard for me to imagine Sarah Palin having the temperament and conceptual understanding to deal with a complex foreign policy crisis. Again, I don’t think she’s dumb. But I am nearly certain that given the very dangerous waters into which the ship of state is sailing, she is incapable of being a reliable captain if it came to that. Nearly.

Rich Lowry likes the cut of her jib:

Palin held her own against Joe Biden, and flashed the poise and charm that made her such a star at the Republican convention.

[snip]

She dropped her G’s (”puttin’ government back on the side of the people”) and said “darn” and “doggonit” in a folksy, familiar style; he referred to himself in the third person in the self-important senatorial style.

She kept it general, direct and common-sensical; he loaded his answers with detail. She exuded a sincerity that pulsed through the screen; he seemed like a typical senator.

[snip]

Yes, there were obvious weak points in her knowledge. She didn’t defend McCain effectively on deregulation, didn’t rebut Biden’s detailed critique of McCain’s health-care plan and seemed at sea in answering a question about nuclear policy.

But she also laid good clean hits on Biden. And he couldn’t respond to some of them - for instance, his own criticism (during the primaries) of Obama as not ready to be president.

Plus, he was the one who made the more obvious factual errors, falsely denying that Obama had pledged to meet without pre-condition with Iranian President Ahmadinejad and claiming that McCain had voted the same way as Obama on a budget resolution repealing the Bush tax cuts.

In the runup to the debate, Biden stressed how often he’d debated women. Sure - but not a woman like Sarah Palin.

Tom Bevan notes a very important distinction (one I alluded to in my post last night):

Stylistically, both candidates played to their strengths. Biden was knowledgeable and statesmanlike, delivering responses with authority. Palin was folksy and plain spoken, casting her responses in terms that the middle class could identify with.

Unsurprisingly, in the spin room after the debate both camps claimed victory. Rudy Giuliani declared that Palin hit a “home run.” Fred Thompson concurred, adding that after tonight Palin’s detractors should be “ashamed of themselves.”

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said Biden turned in the most effective line of the night by ticking off the ways in which John McCain was the same as George W. Bush, adding that Palin failed to offer a single difference between McCain and Bush in response. Linda Douglass gave Palin points for her peformance skills but said that Biden was “hands down the winner on substance.”

David Brooks disagrees with Bevan on this point:

On matters of substance, her main accomplishment was to completely sever ties to the Bush administration. She treated Bush as some historical curiosity from the distant past. Beyond that, Palin broke no new ground, though she toured the landscape of McCain policy positions with surprising fluency. Like the last debate, this one was surprisingly wonky — a lifetime subscription to Congressional Quarterly. Palin could not match Biden when it came to policy detail, but she never obviously floundered.

Brooks then goes on to talk about the important role of our contemporary culture in making Palin’s folksiness workable:

Where was this woman was during her interview with Katie Couric?

Their primal need for political survival having been satisfied, her supporters then looked for her to shift the momentum. And here we come to the interesting cultural question posed by her performance. The presidency and the vice presidency once was the preserve of white men in suits. As the historian Ellen Fitzpatrick pointed out on PBS Thursday night, if, in 1984, Geraldine Ferraro had spoken in the relentlessly folksy tones that Palin used, she would have been hounded out of politics as fundamentally unserious.

But that was before casual Fridays, boxers or briefs and T-shirt-clad Silicon Valley executives. Today, Palin can hit those colloquial notes again and again, and it is not automatically disqualifying.

On Thursday night, Palin took her inexperience and made a mansion out of it. From her first “Nice to meet you. May I call you Joe?” she made it abundantly, unstoppably and relentlessly clear that she was not of Washington, did not admire Washington and knew little about Washington. She ran not only against Washington, but the whole East Coast, just to be safe…

No doubt we’ll be seeing a lot more opinion (and disagreement) of note very soon.

And of course, if you still want to find mind-boggling love-fests for patriarchal figures from liberal feminists, they’re out there too. (This may be the first time in human history that a leftist woman has said, “Political equality for women will not come from the minimization or idealization of motherhood — but rather from recognizing fatherhood as a significant factor in our culture and politics.”)

Wonders never cease.