Biden vs. Palin: Let's get ready to rumble
Posted: Thursday, October 02, 2008 9:32 AM by Carrie Dann
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch tees up tonight’s VP debate. “Although Obama and McCain have three debates of their own, it's the vice presidential face-off that has taken on the aura of the marquee event. ‘This is the first time it seems that a vice presidential debate might have an impact on the election,’ said Peter Kastor, a history professor at Washington University. And most of the credit goes to the Alaska governor, a virtual unknown before she was selected five weeks ago as McCain's running mate.”
Video: Former McCain political strategist and NBC analyst Mike Murphy and Democratic strategist Paul Begala give their predictions for Thursday’s vice presidential debate.The
Boston Globe: "Republican Sarah Palin - under intense scrutiny for her few unscripted remarks as a candidate and losing the confidence of voters - faces the first extended audition of her capabilities, knowledge, and ability to improvise since she became the nominee. Democrat Joe Biden - a master of televised bombast as a two-time presidential candidate and assertive Senate committee chairman - faces the challenge to find his footing as a secondary figure on stage, balancing the roles of foil, inquisitor, and bystander. The pressure on the first-term Alaska governor has transformed the debate from a typical exchange between top campaign surrogates into a test of whether Palin is qualified for national office."
A new Washington Post/ABC poll finds that six in 10 voters see Palin “as lacking the experience to be an effective president, and a third are now less likely to vote for McCain because of her.”
The New York Daily News spoke to one of Palin's former debate competitors, who said she's no pushover. "Palin sliced and diced the more experienced, data-driven legislator and another foe during some two dozen debates in Alaska's 2006 gubernatorial race. She did it not with sharp discourses on policy, but with the same talent she's shown since becoming the Republican veep choice - a folksy tone, delivered in meandering, run-on sentences that mostly kill the clock but occasionally slice like a knife, Halcro says. Asked about the environment, Palin spoke about naming her daughter Bristol for Alaska's Bristol Bay. Pressed on high gas prices, she talked about her family's struggle to buy a new car. And to Alaska's native population, she deftly reached out by talking about her husband's Yu'pik Eskimo grandparent."
Video: With voter opinion of GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin declining ahead her debate with Sen. Joe Biden, is she bringing down the Republican ticket? Rachel Maddow is joined by former Palin staffer Larry Persily.
Um, is it really that kosher to find out Joe Biden has used his campaign treasury for things like landscaping? The
New York Times delves into Biden's finances and reports, "Although he is among the least wealthy members of the millionaires club that is the United States Senate — he and his wife, Jill, a college professor, earn about $250,000 a year — Mr. Biden maintains a lifestyle that is more comfortable than the impression he may have given on the campaign trail. A review of his finances found that when it comes to some of his largest expenses, like the purchase and upkeep of his home and his use of Amtrak trains to get around, he has benefited from resources and relationships not available to average Americans.”
“As a secure incumbent who has rarely faced serious competition during 35 years in the Senate, Mr. Biden has been able to dip into his campaign treasury to spend thousands of dollars on home landscaping and some of his Amtrak travel between Wilmington, Del., where he lives, and Washington. And the acquisition of his waterfront property a decade ago involved wealthy businessmen and campaign supporters, some of them bankers with an interest in legislation before the Senate, who bought his old house for top dollar, sold him four acres at cost and lent him $500,000 to build his new home.”
“There is nothing to suggest Mr. Biden bent any rules in the sale, purchase and financing of his homes. Rather, he appears to have benefited at times from the simple fact of who he is: a United States senator, not just ‘Amtrak Joe,’ the train-riding everyman that the Obama-Biden campaign has deployed to rally middle-class voters."
The New York Times also looks at the issues Palin has focused on in her first 22 months as governor. "When Gov. Sarah Palin meets Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Thursday in the vice-presidential debate, even her fellow Alaskans might hear for the first time some of her views on health care reform, education policy and other issues of state government. In her 22 months in office, Ms. Palin has not addressed many of those matters in a significant way, pursuing a narrower agenda rooted in Alaska’s resource-based economy.”
“Ms. Palin has approved increased spending for education and the elderly, sued the federal government for listing the polar bear as a threatened species, and pushed for a bill that would have reduced state regulation of new medical facilities. But by and large, oil and gas issues have dominated her tenure."
The AP went to Huntsville, Ala., and found… "Even in the staunchly Republican South, Palin is facing deep skepticism about her qualifications heading into Thursday night's debate with her Democratic counterpart, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware. The wave of enthusiasm here that greeted the Alaska governor's conservative positions on social and religious issues remains in many quarters, but it has been tempered by uncertainty about her readiness, particularly among moderates."
Joe Six-Pack? "Sarah Palin and her husband have pieced together a uniquely Alaskan income that reached comfortably into six figures even before she became governor, capitalizing on valuable fishing rights, a series of land deals and a patchwork of other ventures to build an above-average lifestyle. Add up the couple's 2007 income and the estimated value of their property and investments and they appear to be worth at least $1.2 million. That would make the Palins, like Democratic vice presidential rival Joe Biden and his wife Jill, well-off but not nearly as wealthy as multimillionaire couples John and Cindy McCain and, to a lesser extent, Barack and Michelle Obama."
