VDH on Peoria

From his blog:

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Sophisticates would rather listen to the six-term Senator Biden suavely and masterfully mislead (on every thing from the legislative responsibilities of the Vice President and confusion about Article I of the Constitution to Hezbollah in Lebanon) than an honest and sincere Palin speak directly to the people. Everyone else would not.

So yes, Biden sounded the more impressive in terms of recall and facts, but it was the transitory experience of a mint that melts almost instantaneously—once you realize that almost all of the sweeping sweet assertions you just heard were, on reflection, simply untrue and so now gone and forgotten. The story today is an embarrassing fact-checking of Biden’s bombast to a far greater degree than is true of Palin’s assertions.

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So the debate had the character of one of those 1940s “champ” fight movies, in which the deft, cocky and more refined puncher beats up—at the beginning—the nervous sweaty challenger with the far greater heart. A man with three decades in the Senate, who reminds us ad nauseam of where he was and what he has done almost every second, in theory should have easily won; but this simply did not happen, in part to Palin’s charisma and Biden’s pontifications and distortions.…

As the rounds wore on, Palin lost much of her nervousness, smiled, and came into her own as the voice of an outsider who was not impressed by the same old, same old DC smugness. And as she did punch back, Biden began losing his composure, sighing with occasional break-ins and interruptions.

The more data he cited (much of it, again, less than factual [e.g., Biden really did, as Palin noted, rule out coal-generated power; he really did once deprecate Obama’s Iraq suggestions as ill-founded and dangerous; and he really does wish to create a trillion dollars in new spending entitlements; and senior commanders really do think the tactics in Iraq, mutatis mutandis, are of enormous advantage in Afghanistan]), the less effective he became. He’s a good debater, but he ended up out-pointing Palin and still clearly losing.

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I cannot think of any presidential or vice presidential candidate who talked—manner, accent, gesture—in an authentically Middle Class fashion, and did so unapologetically. Bill Clinton could do it, but it was a performance to be turned on and off as needed. She sounds like voices in America (I’m in rural Michigan as I write this); but compared to life in the DC/NY nexus, she sounds like she’s from Mars as well. Biden often looked like an anthropological grad student on a South Pacific island doing his field work, both intrigued and taken back by the quaint habits of the otherwise inferior natives. I almost thought in the fashion of John Kerry he would sigh “I can’t believe I’m losing to this…..”