Hate to Say I Told You So

But I did tell you so.

She didn't drool on herself, so folks are calling it a win. Never mind that she didn't actually answer any questions, and couldn't go off script to answer any of Senator Biden's attacks on McCain. I believe that Nate at fivethirtyeight put it best though: "To be completely frank if that were anyone other than Sarah Palin on stage, this would be regarded as a blowout..."

Mr. Biden I thought played it perfectly: there was nothing to gain by attacking Ms. Palin directly. I'm sure she was waiting the whole night with some well-crafted comeback designed to make her look like the plucky female victim of the big male bully. By keeping the attacks on McCain and on policy, he kept her on shaky ground the whole night. She could only fall back on her talking points, even after they'd been debunked.

Four highlights for me:

• "The past is prolog" A perfect reposte to Ms. Palin's woefully ignorant complaint about Obama's "looking backward."
• "I haven't heard how McCain will differ from Bush," the perfect response to her whine about his continued dissection of the Bush regime. Made all the better because she had no response to that.
• The awesome dismantling of the "maverick" theme. Only Mr. Biden could have done that, and I thought waiting until the end of the debate, after Ms. Palin had said maverick about 130 times, was smart.
• The momentary deer-in-headlights look on Ms. Palin's face when asked about the possible use of nuclear weapons.

The real loser last night was Gwen Ifill. To some extent you can blame the format, but she never pushed for answers to her questions, and then cut it off anytime there was something akin to a discussion going on. She never got back to the education issue, even though it was clear that both candidates wanted to talk about it, and I believe most Americans wanted to hear about it.

And how could she let Governor Palin get away with "I'm not going to answer your questions, I'm going to talk to the American people..."? All Ms. Ifill had to do at that point is say, "well, you agreed to these rules, if you don't want to follow them, neither should I," and then let a real debate fly.