Morning Coffee (132)

Good morgen and such. Of course, maybe it's not morning where you are. Maybe it's night. Maybe you're in Purgatory and you live in perpetual darkness. Maybe the sun never rises on you because you're life is horrible. If any of this is the case, the Morning Coffee will not help brighten your day, because it's only served black. But maybe it will lessen the pain...

Vice Presidential Debates - Part One...and Only:
Speaking of pain, the sado-masochists at the Morning Coffee (me) like pain. That's why we do things like watch political debates. Every hard-hitting, eye-gouging second of them.

Reading the news today, you'll see that Joe Biden, the VP pick of Barack Obama, won the debate. You'll also see that Sarah Palin, the VP pick of John McCain, won the debate. Amazing, isn't it? Two winners.

Immediately after the debate, on Fox News (fair and balanced even), the pundits on Brit Hume's show overwhelmingly suggested that Palin won the debate, except for William Kristol from The Weekly Standard. Kristol did say that Palin did better than Biden, but that he couldn't call a winner.

Many pundits suggested that by simply showing up, Palin would win because the bar had been set so low. Well, we who Brew the Morning Coffee do not give such pity points to poorly experienced politicians. We like to call it like it is: Palin did not come close to winning that debate.

For one, to me debates are formal affairs. As such, I don't really appreciate the folksy lingo used by Palin, although I'm sure many of my fellow citizens do. Actually, it felt sort of forced; thrown out with such frequency that maybe the user wasn't as well versed as she wanted to come across. Her speech seemed to become more riddled with these little sayings as she went along, as if there was a conscious effort to appear more "regular Joe." Again, I'm sure many people loved it, but it bothers me. I got the sense that it's pure pandering. But I also feel that there's a time and place for that sort of speak, and a debate isn't one of them. Forgive me if I'm a stickler for form AND substance at the same time.

With that being said, we did get an awful lot of quasi-substance with Palin last night. She was so eager to dispel the notion that she was out of her league that she felt that she had to literally shotgun the room with her answers. She appeared frantic to me. Not frantic in the sense of hysterics, but frantic in the sense that she had to touch on every issue possible, foreign policy in particular. Contrast this with Biden's far more measured responses to Ifill's questions or Palin's criticisms. Biden was not shotgunning the room. Palin was so eager that she even asked if she could talk about Afghanistan when Afghanistan was not the topic of discussion at that point. Great. Good on her. But she regurgitated talking points like a college student would on a final exam. Context seemed to be lost. How all the pieces fit together didn't seem to cross her mind. The goal was simple: spew out as many "facts" and names (even if the names were incorrect) as possible. That'll show those pundits who say she isn't well versed in foreign policy matters. I will not argue that the governor is a quick study, but I took a class in macroeconomics for 10 weeks, crammed for the final, and passed the class, but you do not want me in charge of anything more complex than my own household's finances.

But oddly, this wasn't even what bothered me most about Palin's performance, as I pretty much knew what to expect on that front. What bothered me most was this comment, made at the beginning of the debate:

"And I may not answer the questions [the way] that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also."

This statement allowed Palin to stick to her narrowly defined talking points all night. There were times when she "talked straight" and straight up didn't bother to answer the question posed by the moderator. Just totally gaffed the questions off and spoke about whatever she wanted to. That bothered me for some reason. She has the opportunity to do dozens and dozens of stump speeches during which she can talk about whatever she'd like. So the least she could do was address the questions Ifill posed, all of which I thought were reasonable. As some might say: "Fail."

In Palin's closing comments, she mentioned that she would like more opportunity to debate with Biden, or at least that's what I took as her meaning. That's probably not going to happen. She emerged from this one relatively unscathed, so the McCain camp won't be looking to throw her up there again. After all, the Obama campaign now knows what to expect from her now. She's no longer an unknown quantity, and the Biden would be better armed to do more serious harm to her and McCain. This is all very unfortunate, because I'd be interested to see how she could perform in subsequent debates. But she had to say it, right?

If anything, I actually came away from this debate liking Joe Biden more, which is to say I really had no opinion of him at all prior to last night. What I liked most was not his personality or his funny habit of referring to himself in the third person, or the fact that he's the second poorest member of the Senate, but his answer to Palin's notion that the "Constitution might give the Vice President more power than it has in the past." She agrees with Dick Cheney's idea of the office. To this, Joe Biden stated:

"Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history. The idea he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch. He works in the Executive Branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that...The only authority the vice president has from the legislative standpoint is the vote, only when there is a tie vote. He has no authority relative to the Congress. The idea he's part of the Legislative Branch is a bizarre notion invented by Cheney to aggrandize the power of a unitary executive and look where it has gotten us. It has been very dangerous."

Biden is technically wrong; it's Article II that describes the Executive Branch. His point, however, is most appropriate.

Word of the Day: Slugabed (noun): One who stays in bed until a late hour; a sluggard.

On This Day in History: The First Battle of Philippi took place in 42 BCE, during which Mark Antony and Octavian line their legions against those of Brutus and Cassius, assassins of Julius Caesar. In 1849, Edgar Allen Poe was last sean in public when he was found delirious in a gutter in Baltimore. The fourth Thursday in November is declared by Abraham Lincoln as Thanksgiving in 1863. The Russian paper, Pravda, meaning truth, is founded by Leon Trotsky and others in exile in Vienna, Austria in 1908. Germany launches the first successful V-2 rocket, which becomes the first man-made object to reach space in 1942. In 1964, the first ever Buffalo Wings are made at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York (thanks guys!). Germany reunifies in 1990. O.J. Simpson is found not guilty of murdering Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman.

"Clever tyrants are never punished." - Voltaire.