My favorite thing about (some) Obama supporters is their use of cool logic and reasoning, and a dedication to the issues at hand, rather than being caught up with petty personal issues.

I think your post can be summarized with this line... "you uneducated small minded snotty prom queen!!!"

Anyone that thinks Palin is uneducated or small-minded after watching this debate is not worth TPM's time.

anyone who watched that debate and somehow deduced that sarah palin is intellectually curious and proven is beyond daft....she is a great pupil at sticking to her talking points though....i give her that much....she dazzles the camera with the smiles, the winks, the folksy down talkin'...look, if you liked her in the beginning, you are heads over heels now...if she made you uncomfortable in the beginning, you have even more questions now! pat buchanan is besides himself with her performance and that is to be expected, but outside of the base, i dont think she made any impact...

"Can I call you Joe?" Joe Biden is U.S. Senator who has served this country for 36 years; you uneducated small minded snotty prom queen!!!
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Obama called McCain, John, several times in their debate. I don't recall you being upset about that.

Winking and flirting will go a long way to rebuilding the U.S. image on the world stage.

Sarah Palin undid her facade of charm and "regular" person humanity by her glib, unresponsive and uncaring response after Biden talked about being a single father and wondering if a child would live. He superbly kept control, though revealing deep human pain, and she glibly rattled off McCain is a maverick talking points as though she did not even listen to him

Moreover, her folksiness was so false it nauseated me. I get folksy, I am from small rural American where people say things like By Golly and Bless their hearts. But guess what, we don't say bless their hearts about oil company CEO's even ironically.

I thought her "folksy" performance not only came off as fake, but somehow cheapened the whole process...and the office she's running for, quite frankly. It was SUCH a turn off.

If the p.c. hysteria of this post and thread are any indication, I guess Dems are worried about the potential power of Palin's sex appeal.

I was struck by something that I don't really know how to interpret -- on two or three occasions, Sarah Palin would lower her voice, quiet it down just a bit, look into the camera, and get sort of breathy. I guess that was sort of a desire to project sincerity and caring and warmth, but I had the uneasy feeling that she was trying to be seductive. And hey -- I've been happily married for 29 years, and no one has tried to seduce me in longer than that, so this is not a conclusion I leap to.

Did anyone else notice this? Am I misinterpreting?

By Republican standards, she's perfect because all they basically require in a world leader is someone to wear good clothes, sit in the chair, and sign the papers that open the sluices of federal treasure to the right entities. She's perfect by their standards, because she can take direction, and get off all the right memes without the slightest care about their relative factuality, or the destruction they do to the national fabric or psyche.

Republicans are not interested in intelligence, in democracy, fairness, or justice. They want money. Which makes Palin the PERFECT TOOL.

I think her attempts to appear and sound folksy were over the top --- at times felt crude.

Seems that Peggy Noonan loved it. Maybe this is what she means by 'patriotic grace'. All we need is more winking!

After watching the debate three points were very clear to me:

Biden has the experience, knowledge and right position for the role. He was credible and the clear winner.

Palin delivered the talking points given to her but had no substance. Let's have her campaign party put her back unscripted on the campaign trail and not shield her. I doubt we will see that. They are all breathing a sigh of relief right now. Winking and talking points may work in the roles she's had up to date, but will not in serious discussions with foreign heads of state.

It was also clear that Palin will tow the line for big oil. She did not defend McCain's position of big oil tax breaks.

When I first saw McCain glance down at her legs at the convention, I felt like he had probably fallen for this type of seduction. This winking/flirting crap worked on McCain, so why not broaden the audience.

Geez, living in a blood-red southern state makes me want to pull out my hair every time I try to talk to the people who make up the GOP base about SP. It's so nice to have a choir to preach to.

Every time SP took that long pause to rev up the reformer, maverick, small-town Alaska spiel for the masses, I found my self making a "here we go again" deep sigh. Her manner was annoying, condescending and lacked authenticity.

What I liked about Biden's counter attack was that so far since her nomination, she has acted as though she owns the trade mark on small-town ideals. And when Joe told everyone his life story in Scranton etc. he was basically telling her "Look, we may not be from Wasilla, but dammit, we do understand small-town issues, so get of your high horse."
Since I am from a small town, that really resonated with me because I don't share her values and it makes me mad to see her being passed of as having them because one component in our lives is similar.

Schroedinger cat, as a woman who is also in a male dominated field, I understand your point. I never asked anyone to treat me differently because I was a girl. I always tried to do my best without resorting to sexual innuendo, and there are many times when it did not help me, but I have seen many women get ahead by using their sexuality, and it bothers me. It just seems like conservative men like trophy women and Sarah Palin is the latest one to put on the mantle.

Also, I agree her total lack of empathy for Joe was palpable. I can't say she is without emotion, I think she was just so focused on not screwing up that there was no time for emotions to kick in, but there was that odd smirk when she mentioned her "special needs child." I think the lack of emotion there was even worse than her response to Joe Biden's emotional moment.

Clearly, I have a very different outlook on this than most on this thread. I really don’t care that she winked and wrinkled her nose or got breathy in her tone or the perceived "sexualized" patina people are claiming she invoked. That had, like, NO effect on me and I refuse to judge her on that. Refuse. Sorry. I absolutely refuse to take her apart as a female. The primary campaign with Hillary Clinton taught me to see how that only goes into really bad places. And in rare moments, to my shame, I participated. I regret that. I will no longer do that.

It most certainly is your prerogative to go there and make assertions about your teenage daughter but Palin is no teen. She is a mother of teens. And franky, I do not see any regression in her actions with regard to this as you do. What I see is that during the R-Con in Minn, people claimed that men liked her because she looked good and expressed cohones (see her wolf hunting vid as that expression in the eyes of many people or the ways he allegedly took on the Oil giants in her state...). I see her making a bid to keep those people for McCain.

Now, it’s quite possible, she may lose them by her behavior last night. But I ask you – is that a better reason to not vote for her than because she is not good for the country with regard to her political and religious and legal outlook?

For who she is and her current qualifications and education, she did not do badly last night. In spite of what you may think with regard to her "flirtyness," she actually evinced a covert flintiness. She did not win, certainly, but she did not do badly. Important distinctions and not ones to be overlooked.

What bugged me, specifically is that she was so glib. She was glib about McCain’s purported maverickyness in the face of Biden’s personal strengths. She ran over that with no acknowledgement of his struggle or his deep pain for a family tragedy. That I had a harder time overlooking.

Another thing I found totally irritating was her practice of fake folksiness which is an insult to real people I know who are in fact quite folksy and genuine about it.

Her mispronunciations and misapplications of basic English I found beyond redemption.

Her appropriation and pretensions to political knowledge about other regions of the world were obviously parroted and limited. That I don’t want to see in the WH.

But taking her apart on her flirtyness? I’m not going there. Not.

I think that she was channeling St Ronnie with all the "...there you go again..." crap, but Sarah is no Ronnie (not that that is really something to aspire to anyway.)

I also felt that she was dissing Biden with the whole "can I call you Joe" shtick.

Bottom line, we have had 8 years of fake folksy and I think everyone is tired of it. On that note, did anyone else notice that in his last couple of pleas for the bailout, Bush has lost his phony Texas accent?

You can view Sarah Palin's post-debate analysis of her performance here!

http://www.236.com/video/2008/sarah_palin_vlog_5_postdebate_9308.php

She doesn't remind me of hometown America hockey mom, she's got her lingo mixed up. Sarah speaks like and reminds me of Daisy Mae Scraggs and other wimmenfolk from Dogpatch, USA. Dogpatch?!! THAT's where the pitbull came from. Hee Haw!

http://www.lil-abner.com/dogpatch.html#dogpatch

Offended isn't the right word for how I feel. Disgusted and alarmed are closer. Disgusted because the bimbo-act is always manipulative and stupid. Alarmed because, as a public figure, she affects the image of every woman.

I get the heebie-jeebies listening to her voice, so I watched the whole thing with mute and closed captioning. I strongly recommend going to a website and watching the thing without sound. It's very edifying.

Her body language, not only with the camera but with Biden himself, was seductive in the most literal sense of the word. Her eyes would widen in wonder, she did slow affectionate blinks and winks, her head bobbed softly, and even while uttering the words "stinking corpse" her smile and soft eyes remained unchanged.

I imagine this is supposed to get men to fall in love with her. I don't know about being offended, but I'm definitely disgusted. Any professional woman, and most working women in general, will be alarmed by the idea of a seductress in the White House, no matter which wing she occupies. They'll be pissed off if their husbands act like she's the VPILF.

A female friend said that she and her son were indeed alarmed by Palin. But her husband, a hippie-ish intellectual, was smitten. And that scared her and her son even more.