One up for the Democrats

Was it just me or did they spend most of the time talking about McCain? Palin didn't seem to spend nearly as much time attacking Obama as I had expected. They had fundamentally different tasks, I guess: she was too busy shoring up her own credentials. She started strong, ducked and weaved and wandered, but over the long distance her peppiness wore incredibly thin: there were a lot of blank stares and circular paragraphs towards the end. Publius put it well:

Like her candidacy more generally, it was a sugar rush that fades quickly. It wasn’t so much that she had any truly trainwreck responses (though there was plenty of gibberish). It was that her mindless memorized cutesy lines and winks began to look like amateur hour in comparison to Biden’s command of facts and policy.

Biden started weakly but built to an impassioned, grave finish — respectful on the attack, but never letting the stakes slip for a second. I'm guessing that the most important person in prepping Biden was Obama himself: that slow, measured build has his fingerprints all over it. And who would have thought that it would be Biden who would play the gender card: his response about men knowing what it is to be single parents was the highlight of the evening — a beautiful moment. For all Palin's much-vaunted ability to connect with voters, it was Biden who was most moving.

CNN Biden 51 Palin 36
CBS Biden 46 Palin 21
Fox Biden 61 Palin 39