2008 U.S. Presidential Election: Vice-Presidential Debate

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I couldn't believe that she didn't know how to pronounce nuclear :lol: And that she used Joe Six Pack and hockey mom from my drinking game in the same sentence.

I loved that real emotion from Joe Biden

I think Sarah Palin was very well rehearsed and she was able to tailor her talking points to the questions (sometimes she used them even though they had little to do with the actual question). The questions were too general-I'd love to see her in a town hall setting, having to answer specific questions. That's why she has trouble with media interviews-oh yeah, it's just gotcha journalism.

I liked how she said "can I call you Joe" when they both came out, I thought that was actually charming.
 
biden certainly won the debate... but the media made palin out to be such a bafoon that the fact that she didn't get trounced by biden is in many ways a victory for palin... simply because she wasn't this big doofus that we've all been led to believe.

I think the media put the interviews out there. But a lot of people around here bought into it hook line and sinker.

She could'nt have been as dumb as they were saying. Anyone with half a brain should have relized that. She's the governor of a energy producing state, not a community organizer.
 
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) now must win Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or Minnesota in order to get enough electoral votes to win the presidency, his campaign says.

Those were considered swing states in 2000 and 2004, but George W. Bush lost them both times.

"Our ability to pick off one of those three states is where our fortunes are largely held," a McCain official said. "These are states where Barack Obama is on the defense."

Does anybody here actually believe McCain has a chance in one of those three states? If so, which one and why?
 
I don't mind folksy (I've been raised in a folksy southern family), I just mind folksy that doesn't seem authentic.

So was I--born and raised about an hour South from you. But it's different, as you say, it's authentic. But even my folksy family doesn't drop the "g" in every word and insert "darn" and "betcha" and after every third word. And they can even speak without that smug fake smile. Sarah Palin is the type of girl everyone hated in my high school.
 
Does anybody here actually believe McCain has a chance in one of those three states? If so, which one and why?

Weren't some people saying that they thought Minnesota was going to go to McCain? I'm not really worried at all about Wisconsin, from what I've heard its usually pretty solidly Democratic. Pennsylvania, I think, is still somewhat up in the air. I would definitely say Obama has a much better chance of winning it than McCain, though. Do you think Obama has a strong lead in all 3 states? I always have a hard time finding believable state-by-state polls.
 
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:lol: This is so cool! We're getting to see the debut of a Classic Sting Talking Point. It's like being there the first time he mentioned 1441 or "without preconditions"!

If we just agree with you right now, can we put this one to rest?

If you want to talk about Sting, start another thread.
 
w/the hair plugs or w/o?
w/the botox or w/o?
w/the teeth whitener or w/o?

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well, if the robot's exterior was exceptionally life-like, it could probably take advantage of these cosmetic enhancements in much the same way joe o'biden has. as such, i wouldn't consider them to be defining characteristics of either subject.
 
Oh, I forgot were not supposed to hold Joe Biden to the standard thats been set for Sarah Palin. :wink:

In case you haven't noticed, the criticisms of Sarah Palin are based on her overall style, demeanour, knowledge, and (lack of) argumentation. Your criticism of Joe Biden is based on a rebuttal of a single piece of evidence. You've fixated on a minute detail and are trying to pass it off as a broad condemnation. As I said earlier, you are making a ridiculous conflation here.

Big difference.
 
Is that the best you can do? Throughout the debate, he undeniably demonstrated a broad and deep knowledge and drew on specific details and evidence to support his claims. That's what good debaters do. And all you can do is grab just one particular piece of evidence from the many he presented and rebut it, as if this single rebuttal is somehow a rebuttal of everything else he said and negates his experience! What a ridiculous conflation.

Nobody here is saying that he was perfect or that every single item of evidence he presented to sustain his argumentation was precise and correct. In such a lengthy debate, some kind of error is natural and expected. I would not expect anybody to nail everything.

But at least he consistently and thoroughly drew upon evidence to substantiate his arguments. Sarah Palin, meanwhile, seems completely unfamiliar with such a basic principle of debating and is lucky if she can articulate something that vaguely resembles an argument more than an irrelevant ramble.

I'm sorry that example of Biden's substance was not good enough for ya. Some more classic Biden for ya:

BIDEN: Complained about "economic policies of the last eight years" that led to "excessive deregulation."

THE FACTS: Biden voted for 1999 deregulation that liberal groups are blaming for part of the financial crisis today. The law allowed Wall Street investment banks to create the kind of mortgage-related securities at the core of the problem now. The law was widely backed by Republicans as well as by Democratic President Clinton, who argues it has stopped the crisis today from being worse.

BIDEN: Warned that Republican presidential candidate John McCain's $5,000 tax credit to help families buy health coverage "will go straight to the insurance company."

THE FACTS: That's not surprising — the money is meant to pay for health insurance. The Obama campaign tried to capitalize on the candidates' health care exchange by issuing an ad Friday contending that the Republicans can't explain "the McCain health tax."

BIDEN: Said McCain supports tax breaks for oil companies, and "wants to give them another $4 billion tax cut."

THE FACTS: Biden is repeating a favorite saw of the Obama campaign, and it's misleading. McCain supports a cut in income taxes for all corporations, and doesn't single out any one industry for that benefit.

BIDEN: "As a matter of fact, John recently wrote an article in a major magazine saying that he wants to do for the health care industry — deregulate it and let the free market move — like he did for the banking industry."

THE FACTS: Biden and Obama have been perpetuating this distortion of what McCain wrote in an article for the American Academy of Actuaries. McCain, laying out his health plan, only referred to deregulation when saying people should be allowed to buy health insurance across state lines. In that context, he wrote: "Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation."

BIDEN: "The charge is absolutely not true. Barack Obama did not vote to raise taxes."

THE FACTS: The vote was on a nonbinding budget resolution that assumed that President Bush's tax cuts would expire, as scheduled, in 2011. If that actually happened, it could mean higher taxes for people making as little as about $42,000. But Obama is proposing tax increases only on the wealthy, and would cut taxes for most others.

We read it the first time, you know. You don't have to repeat the same damn point three times in fourteen minutes. Now, if it had gone ignored for fourteen days, that's another thing entirely. But in this case, you just look like a bit of a broken record, somebody desperately scrambling for a talking point to hammer home in ignorance to all the other points out there that go against you.

I know its hard for the majority of members here in little San Francisco to digest any criticism of Obama, Biden, or any Democrats, but what better way to Free Your Mind in a place where you often only read repeated criticisms of Republicans, than by actually reading some criticism(repeated or not) of your precious party and candidates. :wink:
 
No.

Sarah Palin made Sarah Palin out to be such a buffoon.

while she certainly didn't help herself, she certainly wasn't as bad as the media was making her out to be.

if you were to listen to the talking heads, you'd be expecting her to go all stockdale on us last night. she didn't. she didn't even quayle.

she didn't win the debate, but she didn't get trounced. if the media, and in the media i include the SNL's and daily shows of the world, didn't set the bar so incredibly low for Palin, then biden's victory last night would have been even greater than it was.
 
one conservative intellectual raises the white flag:
Hail Mary vs. Cool Barry

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, October 3, 2008; A23

Krauthammer's Hail Mary Rule: You get only two per game. John McCain, unfortunately, has already thrown three. The first was his bet on the surge, a deep pass to David Petraeus who miraculously ran it all the way into the end zone.

Then, seeking a game-changer after the Democratic convention, McCain threw blind into the end zone to a waiting Sarah Palin. She caught the ball. Her subsequent fumbles have taken the sheen off of that play, but she nonetheless invaluably solidifies his Republican base.

When the financial crisis hit, McCain went razzle-dazzle again, suspending his campaign and declaring that he'd stay away from the first presidential debate until the financial crisis was solved.

He tempted fate one time too many. After climbing up on his high horse, McCain had to climb down. The crisis unresolved, he showed up at the debate regardless, rather abjectly conceding Obama's mocking retort that presidential candidates should be able to do "more than one thing at once." (Although McCain might have pointed out that while he was trying to do two things, Obama was sitting on the sidelines doing one thing only: campaigning.)

You can't blame McCain. In an election in which all the fundamentals are working for the opposition, he feels he has to keep throwing long in order to keep hope alive. Nonetheless, his frenetic improvisation has perversely (for him) framed the rookie challenger favorably as calm, steady and cool.

In the primary campaign, Obama was cool as in hip. Now Obama is cool as in collected. He has the discipline to let slow and steady carry him to victory. He has not at all distinguished himself in this economic crisis -- nor, one might add, in any other during his national career -- but detachment has served him well. He understands that this election, like the election of 1980, demands only one thing of the challenger: Make yourself acceptable. Once Ronald Reagan convinced America that he was not menacing, he won in a landslide. If Obama convinces the electorate that he is not too exotic or green or unprepared, he wins as well.

When after the Republican convention Obama's poll numbers momentarily slipped behind McCain's, panicked Democrats urged him to get mad. He did precisely the opposite. He got calm. He repositioned himself as ordinary, becoming the earnest factory-floor, coffee-shop, union-hall candidate.

In doing so, he continues his clever convention-speech pivot from primary to general election. In a crowded primary field in which he was the newcomer and the stranger, he rose above the crowd on pure special effects: dazzling rhetoric, natural charisma, and a magic carpet ride of transcendence and hope.


It worked for two reasons: Democrats believe that nonsense, and he was new. But now he needs more than Democrats. And novelty fades.

Obama understood that the magic was wearing off and the audacity of hope wearing thin. Hence the self-denial perfectly personified in his acceptance speech in Denver. He could have had 80,000 people in rapture. Instead, he made himself prosaic, even pedestrian, going right to the general election audience to project himself as one of them.

Ordinariness was the theme. His self-told life story? Common man, hence that brazen introductory biopic that shamelessly skipped from Hawaii grade-schooler to Chicago community organizer with not a word about Columbia and Harvard. His riff on American concerns? All middle-class anxieties. His list of programs? All pitched as his middle-class remedies.

He's been moderate in policy and temper ever since. His one goal: Pass the Reagan '80 threshold. Be acceptable, be cool, be reassuring.

Part of reassurance is intellectual. Like Palin, he's a rookie, but in his 19 months on the national stage he has achieved fluency in areas in which he has no experience. In the foreign policy debate with McCain, as in his July news conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Obama held his own -- fluid, familiar and therefore plausibly presidential.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said of Franklin Roosevelt that he had a "second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament." Obama has shown that he is a man of limited experience, questionable convictions, deeply troubling associations (Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Tony Rezko) and an alarming lack of self-definition -- do you really know who he is and what he believes? Nonetheless, he's got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president.



and it seems that Rassmussen has Obama up 10 in NH.

the map is shrinking.

but 4 weeks is a long, long time. i wonder if we'll get a new AQ/OBL video that "endorses" Obama -- we know that AQ needs another bloodthirsty crusadist in the White House to keep the recruitment numbers up.
 
while she certainly didn't help herself, she certainly wasn't as bad as the media was making her out to be.

if you were to listen to the talking heads, you'd be expecting her to go all stockdale on us last night. she didn't. she didn't even quayle.

she didn't win the debate, but she didn't get trounced. if the media, and in the media i include the SNL's and daily shows of the world, didn't set the bar so incredibly low for Palin, then biden's victory last night would have been even greater than it was.


i would say her interview with Couric was worse than anything done by Quayle (except for the "you're no Jack Kennedy" moment).

but when this debate sinks in, and if people go back and read her answers, they'll see that she didn't answer the questions at all. it was all nonsense. can you dispute Biden? sure. but that's because he presented facts and arguments. she gave us pep and facial expressions and can-do spunkiness and got points for being so slightly more grammatical than the lowest-of-the-low standards given to us by GWB. there was no substance. none.

here's one crazy answer she gave us.

"Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced [sic] your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now doggone it, let's look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education and I'm glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right? I say, too, with education, America needs to be putting a lot more focus on that and our schools have got to be really ramped up in terms of the funding that they are deserving. Teachers needed to be paid more. I come from a house full of school teachers. My grandma was, my dad who is in the audience today, he's a schoolteacher, had been for many years. My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here's a shout-out to all those third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School, you get extra credit for watching the debate!"

it's like, no, for real, wtf?
 
i would say her interview with Couric was worse than anything done by Quayle (except for the "you're no Jack Kennedy" moment).

but when this debate sinks in, and if people go back and read her answers, they'll see that she didn't answer the questions at all. it was all nonsense. can you dispute Biden? sure. but that's because he presented facts and arguments. she gave us pep and facial expressions and can-do spunkiness and got points for being so slightly more grammatical than the lowest-of-the-low standards given to us by GWB. there was no substance. none.

here's one crazy answer she gave us.



it's like, no, for real, wtf?

here's the problem.

you or i, or any number of FYMers? yea... we'll go back and read what was actually said, we'll read the papers, the websites, the blogs, watch the talking heads, etc, etc, etc.

the majority of voting americans in their mid 30's and up? they watch the conventions and the debates. other than their nightly news, that's about it.

and that third graders getting extra credit comment? sounds hokey and silly, but that's the kind of shit, sad or not, that plays with most americans.

and we all know nobody watches couric's show, anyways :wink:

still... obama will need to fuck up to lose this election. the democrats uncanny ability to shoot themselves in the face is the only reason why this thing is even still interesting.
 
here's the problem.

you or i, or any number of FYMers? yea... we'll go back and read what was actually said, we'll read the papers, the websites, the blogs, watch the talking heads, etc, etc, etc.

the majority of voting americans in their mid 30's and up? they watch the conventions and the debates. other than their nightly news, that's about it.

and we all know nobody watches couric's show, anyways :wink:


Exactly what I was coming in here to post. Out of everyone watching last night, there will be more people saying "aw, look, she's spunky - I like her!" more so than there will be people paying any actual attention to what was (or what was not) said.
 
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