veep debate comments

I walked in with a bias. Biden has worn his Scranton roots on his sleeves, and I find that abhorrent. He left when he was 10. That’s somewhere around the 4th grade. I grew up in the same section of Scranton as he did. During the 4th grade I was at Henry Longfellow PS 28. I was still quite undeveloped as an individual – as was every other person I knew (a retrospective assessment, of course). Did I relate to the coal-mining roots of my family and the area? Of course not! To relate to them would mean that I was aware of something different. I was just walking the three blocks to school, shoveling the snow, and trying to stay out of trouble.

When Biden pontificates about the formative experience those years were for him, I just want to puke. He looks like he’s from away, he talks like he’s from away, and – shockingly – he is from away.

So I walked into the debate biased. Good thing I was in an online panel – gave to me the opportunity to read other opinions in real time.

Biden is very readable. When he feels that he has locked and loaded, he does this annoying flicking scratch of his neck using his right hand. Did it three times during the debate. He narrows his eyes and lowers his head slightly when he thinks deeply about a response. He exaggerates his facial expression when he wants others to think the opponent made a mistake. His safe place is the moderator, which suggests to me that he doesn’t believe fully everything he says in his attacks. When he was confident in his attacks, he looked at Palin or the audience. But when rattled and scrambling, he responded – with equal apparent force – directly to the moderator.

Palin works hard at not being read. She knows that the camera is the audience and that Biden was the opponent. She looked only those two places – except for when you momentarily led up to it with a zinger. Then she looked down first to speak her words, sometimes down and to her left.

Overall, she cleaned his clock.

UPDATE: If you want some substance, accept first that Palin slapped Biden around plenty on the facts - bot domestic and foreign issues. Another issue concerning the powers of the VEEP under the Constitution was remarkable. Read about it at Power Line Blog. In essence, not only did Biden misquote, misinterpret, and misrepresent the Constitution, he showed his true colors as "simply Cheney bashing" by saying that Cheney, in essence, changed the Constitution in the way he involved himself in the Senate. That feeds the most unlearned in our society. For the learned, are we supposed to believe that Cheney usurped the Constitution and the democrat Senate sat by and let him? Cut me a break.