Analysis: Palin, Biden avoid debate pitfalls
ST. LOUIS -- It was a debate that started with high stakes and low expectations.
The pre-game chatter held that the only televised encounter between Sarah Palin, who has stumbled in recent interviews, and the loquacious Joe Biden, prone to gaffes, could well turn out to be a train wreck.
Instead, the two vice presidential candidates delivered a fierce, fast-talking back-and-forth with tougher criticism than the presidential contenders traded in their first debate last week. Palin chided Biden but reserved her harshest words for Barack Obama, calling him "downright dangerous" for being open to meeting with rogue leaders and "reckless, reckless" in criticizing U.S. incidents in Afghanistan.
Biden rarely focused on Palin — he did make a passing reference to Alaska's notorious "Bridge to Nowhere" — and instead targeted McCain as "out of touch" with the economic concerns of middle-class Americans and offering no significant change from Bush administration policies that have led to stalemate in the Middle East and five years of war in Iraq.
The charges and countercharges over war and taxes, diplomacy and climate change trod mostly on familiar ground. Both candidates exuded confidence and determination — a victory of sorts for Palin, the first-term Alaska governor performing on equal terms with the six-term Delaware senator. Neither made a major obvious gaffe, and both spoke so quickly and relentlessly that the encounter surely scored a record word count in the annals of national debates.
Palin smiled at the camera, winked at the audience and offered a "shout-out" to her brother's third-grade class at Gladys Wood Elementary School. She called herself a "Washington outsider" who was "not used to the way you guys operate," making it clear she saw that as a positive thing.
Biden was more serious and senatorial, focused on policy questions he repeatedly referred to as "fundamental." Toward the end of the debate, his voice caught with emotion as he referred to his time as a single parent after his wife and daughter had been killed in a car accident. "The notion that, somehow, because I'm a man I don't know what it's like to raise two kids alone" is wrong, he said. He cited his hometown roots in Scranton, Pa., and Wilmington, Del., saying he had spent "a lot of time" at Home Depot.
