Quote:


Is not melting down really the bar we want our... potential leader to pass?



Hardly. The fact remains however, that this was the bar that was set. For this, the Obama camp has only itself to blame: By insisting that she was a latter-day Dan Quayle, they made people's expectations so low that they were expecting a massacre. It didn't happen.

As for Biden, he was also better than expected. He's known to get easily flustered in debates and make mistakes. For the most part, this didn't happen, either.

The New York Times seems to agree:


A Candidate Recaptures Her Image


"Oh, man, it’s so obvious I’m a Washington outsider, and someone just not used to the way you guys operate,” she said after her opponent explained, somewhat awkwardly, why he had voted in favor of the Iraq war.

And that was how Sarah Palin got the better of Sarah Palin. The debate wasn’t so much between Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Ms. Palin as it was between the dueling images of the Alaska governor: the fuzzy-minded amateur parodied — with her own words — by Tina Fey on “Saturday Night Live” or the gun-toting hockey mom who blazed into history at the Republican convention...

And Ms. Palin was the one who set the tone, making Mr. Biden sound stuffy before he had a chance to make her look unsteady. She bounded onto the stage, shook hands with her opponent and said brightly, “Hey, can I call you Joe..."

She twinkled, cocked her head, and spoke as plainly as she could. “Darn right it was predator lenders,” she told the moderator, Gwen Ifill of PBS, when asked who was to blame for the mortgage meltdown. Her sentences had lots of pep and patriotism, and few g’s at the end of her words — “You betcha” and “Get down to gettin’ business done” and “doggone it.”

Expectations for both candidates were low, but the expectations for the debate were almost absurdly high — cable news commentators led up to the event like children on a Halloween sugar bender, deliriously excited by what The Washington Times described as a “Thrilla in Manila” showdown.

Mr. Biden made few mistakes; he appeared more measured and thoughtful on substance, and made forceful points that contrasted with Ms. Palin’s slogans. But she provided the more vivacious, visceral television performance: it was a 90-minute sprint to reclaim her identity as a feisty, folksy frontierswoman ready to storm Washington. And she did it like a reality show contestant — broadly, with stagey asides to the camera, including an assurance to some third-grade students, in what she called a “shout-out,” that they would get extra credit for tuning in...

Ms. Palin attacked her opponent’s positions on taxes and on the war with gusto, at one point accusing Mr. Biden of “waving the white flag of surrender” in Iraq. But mostly, she tried to recoup from past blunders on foreign policy. She twice dropped the name of Kim Jong Il of North Korea, made a point of referring to Iran’s president and described the Cuban leadership as “the Castro brothers.” She also recast her television interviews as traps set by liberals, not unforced errors of her own.

At the end of the debate, before she was surrounded by her husband and children, and burped her newborn, she thanked the moderator for the chance to talk to the American people “without the filter, even of the mainstream media, kind of telling viewers what they’ve just heard.”

It was a pre-emptive strike against commentators poised to critique her performance and a retroactive strike against the other Sarah Palin.

Article