VP Debate

After watching the Vice Presidential Debate I have to believe that the picking of the quotes of the day cannot in any way shape or form be a random event since this was there today:

Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions.
- Evan Esar

Holy crap I've never heard so much bickering and back and forth and complete and utter twisting of data. After watching the whole thing I'm convinced I wasted my time and should have just ignored it and read the summaries on the following day. I would love to see someone actually go through and count how many times they both referred to Obama or McCain. Maddening. And if I had to hear Palin attempting to sound folksy with her "darned right" and "doggoneit's" one more time my eardrums may start to bleed. And meanwhile Biden is a hyperbole machine. It's the most important election of our lifetime or Cheney was the worst Vice President in history. Apparently in Biden's world everything is an extreme.

At the beginning of the both of their complete lack of answering the actual question asked was annoying, but further into the debate at least Biden seemed to at start addressing the actual question that was asked a most times. Given Palin's performance in the Couric interviews and how low the bar was for her I suspect most people thought this would be a disaster. And given that people had such low performance expectations of her I'll bet most people will say she won the debate simply because she didn't make any completely obvious gaffes. Although her answering the question about when should the option of using nuclear weapons be put on the table as "a result of the be all end all of too many people" was a bit bizarre (I suspect she really meant to have multiple sentences there and got nervous and jammed them together and dropped a lot of words). And I'll actually give Palin credit for at least citing one example of how a Palin administration would differ from a McCain administration before lapsing into the "I would support everything John McCain does" (and I'm not playing favorites, Biden did the same thing of saying he would basically be an Obama administration but without the example of a difference). So overall I believe Biden made better points and responded to the questions better and from a pure debating aspect did better. But because of the low bar set for Palin I think she's going to come out of the debate looking better for having met and exceeded the low expectations set beforehand.