Listening to Sarah Palin

Media commentators were breathless    in anticipation of the vice presiden   tial debate between Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Sarah Palin. Given Palin's repeated gaffes in television interviews, there was an expectation that she might self-destruct in this nationally televised event.

This did not occur. Instead, Palin followed a disciplined debate strategy: she did not answer most of the questions asked (at one point she announced, "I'm not going to answer the questions the way the moderator or my opponent would like me to"), and, instead, delivered a series of prepared mini-speeches to fill time. Palin was friendly and, somewhat disturbingly flirtatious (with winks, etc.), and folksy, sprinkling her answers with colloquialisms ("doggone," "you betcha," etc). Because her pat speeches had been prepared in advance, she didn't stumble into gibberish, as she had in her earlier interviews, and appeared overall to be competent enough to please her supporters. I had expected as much.

I had noted before the debate that in watching and evaluating Sarah Palin's debate performance, it would be important not to focus exclusively on what she doesn't know about critical foreign policy issues. More useful, I believed, would be filtering out what she does know.