What if Palin Wins?
Although many have already made up their mind about Sarah Palin’s performance in tonight’s upcoming debate (including, I might add, the moderator), the question must, of course, be asked, what will happen if she manages to defy the expectations of her critics and… wins? What will that mean for the legions of Obama supporters who have painted her as a moron at best, and a traitor to her sex at worst? In the past, Palin has managed to fair rather well with a television audience (witness the
To begin, it will first be a commentary on the interviews by Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric: a stunning performance tonight could show those interviews for the “gotcha” sessions they really were. Given that the moderator of tonight’s debate is clearly (and unshamadly) an Obama supporter, even if Palin doesn’t carry out a good performance tonight, if it becomes obvious that the reason for her missteps was a hostile environment, it could accomplish the same thing. (Certainly I agree with John McCain that Ifill, as a professional journalist, is certainly capable of moderating properly and objectively).
What if Palin does terribly? To begin with, it will confirm that her peformence in the Gibson and Couric interviews (both of which have been taken out of context and blown up to epic proportions) was not a fluke. We’ve seen Palin perform well, both in her initial speech after being chosen as McCain’s VP and her speech at the RNC. A bad performance at tonight’s debates will mean that she is as inconsistent a public speaker as George W. Bush: and probably prop up Obama spin that McCain is “another Bush”. It is, at best, a moderate problem for the McCain campaign– this debate show that they have everything to win, and not a great deal to loose.
Biden, on the other hand, has been set up for failure. We are consistently told that Biden is light years better than Palin: that he’s a better speaker (even as his gaffes are overlooked by a media that is clearly in the tank for Obama), that he has more experience, and that he has better ideas. He thus not only has to win this debate, he has to win it by a huge margin– just to stay where he is right now. If Biden makes a serious gaffe tonight, he has far further to fall than Palin, who is already facing troubles over misstatements of her own.
Ultimately, this VP debate is a mirror of the earlier Presidential debate. McCain was supposedly far more qualified on forgien policy than Obama, and even though he clearly won, because he didn’t do it by an enormous margin, (and partly due to the fact that it was half-consumed with economic issues) it was looked upon as a weird kind of failure. The same is true for Biden. But, in constrast, just as Obama “holding on” and putting out a mediocre performance was, in the aftermath, a strange kind of victory, so it will be for Sarah Palin, who basically only has to survive tonight in order to exceed expectations.