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Tonight’s Veep Debate – Pregame Strategy

Jimmie | October 2, 2008 | Comments (0)

With one hour to go until Sarah Palin and Joe Biden face off in front of ethically-challenged moderator Gwen Ifill, each candidate is walking a tightrope and if they slip, they lose.

Joe Biden’s course is pretty easy, were he a normal human being. He has to avoid saying something colossally stupid and he can’t accidentally call the Governor of Alaska “little lady” or something equally dismissive and demeaning. This, however, is Joe Biden, so I’m not willing to place any bets that he won’t. He has an unerring instinct to gaffe when he feels the most comfortable and confident. I can’t imagine any circumstance he’ll face this entire campaign when he’ll be in front of a friendlier crowd and favored more to win. The entire MSM is expecting that he’ll blow Palin away like an oyster cracker in a sandstorm, which means that the odds of his throwing off a sentence that willll completely derail my liveblogging attempts because I’m laughing too hard are really good.

On the other hand, Biden isn’t stupid. He knows he can’t entirely control his tongue. He also knows that this is exactly the type of situation where he’s most likely to say something dumb. It’s entirely possible that he’ll be so circumspect that I’ll be wondering if someone injected him with an animal tranquilizer before he hit the stage. In football parlance, a win for him is easy if he is deliberate, takes the easy yardage, and doesn’t beat himself. He’s heavily favored, has the official in his pocket, and most of the post-game analysts have already written their scripts.

Sarah Palin’s job tonight is either very easy or impossible and though she’s playing uphill tonight, she can still win. If the McCain campaign has been smart, they will have realized that the scrubbed and sanitized Sarah Palin they’ve been shoving into interviews for the past three week is not the Sarah Palin they picked as a running mate. They’ll stop trying to hammer the square peg of Palin’s off the cuff oratory plainness into the round hole of bland political sound bytes. If they let her off her tether, she’ll be better off, but still in a dangerous spot. She won’t be the only one on that stage who is strongest when they’re not spouting carefully-tailored talking points. The way around this is for her to keep Biden on his heels. She has to give him answers he doesn’t expect, throw questions back at him, force him to defend Barack Obama instead of giving him time to talk about himself (which is his favorite subject). She has to be the charming, lovely woman will not hesitate for a second to slip a stiletto between Biden’s ribs at every opportunity. If there’s any pit bull in her, she needs to show it on that stage.

What will make a win impossible for Palin is if she hits the stage as the same frightened-to-screw-up, professionally-handled McCain clone she was in the Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric interviews. That Sarah Palin is not only entirely unappealing, but completely indistinguishable from virtually every politician in Washington. If that’s the Sarah Palin we see, this debate will look like a Harlem Globetrotters exhibition with Palin in the role of the Washington Generals, the hapless referees, and the guy in the front row who thinks he’s going to get drenched with a bucket of water but is hit with confetti instead.

I suspect, though, that there are a few journalists out there rooting for an upset. Palin is the most exciting story in this campaign so far and there’s a chance – not a great chance, but a chance nonetheless – that she might get more slack from the MSM than I expect.

So that’s the situation as I see it. In about 30 minutes, the game is on. It ought to be good.