catsittingstill

1) When Obama says he agrees with an opponent, I hear strong, competent adult being honest and reaching for consensus. When Palin says she agrees with an opponent, the skin between my shoulder blades crawls and I want to glance behind me, looking for the knife. Maybe that's because it seemed like every time she said she agreed with Biden, it was some kind of gotcha attack on Obama, except the one time it was a way to get out of answering the question about whether she supported civil rights for gay couples.

2) I understand that Palin was going to get some things wrong. She's been cramming like crazy for this, and it looks like it worked, mostly, and she just didn't have time to check out anything for herself, but had to accept what her handlers told her. But when she says Barak Obama voted against funding for the troops, and Biden points out that that bill was funding with a timeline, and that John McCain voted the exact same way on it, I expect her to be able to learn from experience on the fly.

When she repeated the slander later in the debate and had to be corrected again, it suggested that, like George W. Bush, she is incapable of revising her opinions based on new information. That's very disturbing. We've had eight years of a president like that and he has been pretty much an unmitigated disaster (or a series of them) for pretty much exactly that reason.

Unless, of course, she knows perfectly well it's false and is just repeating the lie hoping that enough repetitions will make people think it is true. It's a sad situation when "she is deliberately lying, repeatedly, in the hope that the electorate is too dumb to notice or too morally dead to care" is the more hopeful option.

3) Palin managed to be coherent, which is not entirely a surprise; that extra week of cramming seems to have done the trick, and she did okay at debates in Alaska. Biden managed to stay within his times, avoid any major foot-in-mouth episodes, and correct most of Palin's mis-statements without being either mean or condescending. He had the harder task, but I think he accomplished it.

Generally, I don't think it was a game changer.