A Fundamental Difference

2008-10-06
By Eric Easter

“Hey, can I call you Joe?”

As expected, Sarah Palin, from the loudly whispered  and consciously amplified presumption of a first-name basis, stayed in folksy mode and stuck with the oldest political trick in the book, the self-serving switcheroo, i.e. answer the question you’ve studied, not the question you’ve been asked.

It became blatantly obvious at exactly 0:27 minutes in when Palin, clearly without an answer to a question posed about bankruptcy, leapt abruptly to a canned soliloquy on energy policy. And it remained the theme of the night, doggone it and don’tcha know.

If you are of the mind that, after an awful week, Sarah Palin had a low bar to meet in order to look like she was in the game, then she did spectacular.

I am not of that mind. This is serious business, and in the middle of a potentially crushing economic crisis, Palin had much to prove. She proved that she is a quick study of verbiage and when not pushed she can put two words together. But no major mistakes is the level of achievement you want your five-year-old to reach in a piano recital, not what you want for the potential deputy to a 72-year-old president.

Still it was not a completely awful performance if her job was to look undumb and make the Republicans stop sweating bullets. She redeemed herself temporarily, you betcha. But, darn it, it would be hard to imagine that anyone on the fence jumped over that fence based on Palin’s performance.

But wasn’t that the point of picking Palin, to pull in the fence-sitters, particularly those who are women? Is she can’t deliver that, the electoral map won’t move a bit and absent a major dramatic occurrence, Barack Obama will be our next president.

Biden, for his part, was powerful and more importantly, passionate. He, much more so than Barack Obama in fact, deftly connected eight years of failure in economics and foreign policy to the Bush Administration and, by extension, John McCain.

He honed in on three clear points: There is a fundamental difference between Barack Obama and John McCain. John McCain was wrong. John McCain is no maverick.

More than anything, Biden’s performance solidified the intelligence of Obama’s vice presidential pick. He picked a loyal teammate and an authentic governing partner who, with apologies to Jerry Maguire, completes him. McCain is looking to win a race, Obama is planning to lead a country.

Eric Easter is Chief of Digital Strategy for Johnson Publishing Co., Inc. He writes about politics, culture and technology for Ebonyjet.com