Dick Morris Analyzes the VP Debate then Smacks Around Alan Colmes

Happy Weekend TBV readers – enjoy this solid analysis by Dick Morris – and a little bashing of Alan Colmes when he insists on spewing his talking points.

CNN: Palin Spoke at a 10th Grade Level, Biden at Junior High Level

CNN’s own article:

Thursday night’s debate between the vice presidential candidates “was more collegial, thinking out loud as opposed to just hammering points,” Payack said in trying to explain the difference. “It was a much calmer style.”

His analysis ranked the candidates’ speech on several other levels, too. Here’s the breakdown:

Grade level: Biden, 7.8; Palin, 9.5 (Newspapers are typically written to a sixth-grade reading level.)

Sentences per paragraph: statistically tied at 2.7 for Biden and 2.6 for Palin.

Letters per word: tied at 4.4.

Ease of reading: Biden, 66.7 (with 100 being the easiest to read or hear), versus 62.4 for Palin.

The analysis said Abraham Lincoln spoke at an 11th-grade level during his seven debates in 1858 against incumbent Stephen A. Douglas in their race for a Senate seat from Illinois.

But higher grade level doesn’t necessarily mean better sentence, Payack said. He pointed to Palin’s second-to-last sentence in the debate, which the formula put at a grade level of 18.3:

There is someone in America counting the words in a ninety minute debate.  I hope tax payer dollars aren’t funding this

Hillary Clinton on the Debate

“I always thought she’d do well”

“composed and effective debater”

Alan Colmes Should Cry

Killing Him With Kindness

Jeremy Lott has a great article in the Guardian highlighting key points of epic win:

US vice-presidential debates tend to be more interesting than presidential back and fourths. Many people remember Bob Dole’s crack about “Democrat Wars” in 1976, as Gerald Ford’s running mate. Who can recall even one word from his three debates with Bill Clinton 20 years later? Lloyd Bentsen caught Dan Quayle like a deer in the headlights in 1988 by stating the obvious (that he wasn’t a Kennedy). Dick Cheney’s two debates were case studies in how to calmly cut your opponent’s, er, knees off.

Sarah Palin showed on Thursday night that she has her own way of winning: kill him with kindness. From her opening line to Joe Biden – “Hey, can I call you Joe?” – to her brazen refusal to “answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear” to her groan-worthy zinger “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” she sounded upbeat, lyrical, and kinda Minnesotan, dontcha know.

She also sounded like a winner, which was vexing to many debate watchers, especially uptight liberal ones. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson confessed an hour into the exchange “I don’t know what anybody is making of this. I don’t even know what I’m making of it. This is the strangest debate I’ve ever seen.”

But it wasn’t so strange, really, to people who have been observing Palin for any length of time. She has bucked the odds in the past to win bruising elections with meagre resources. She is good at delivering vicious attacks in a way that doesn’t seem at all vicious until you take a step back to look at them.

Last night, Palin used Biden to bludgeon Obama like so: “You opposed the move he made to try to cut off funding for the troops and I respect you for that. I don’t know how you can defend that position now but I know that you know especially with your son in the National Guard and I have great respect for your family also and the honor that you show our military. Barack Obama though, another story there. Anyone I think who can cut off funding for the troops after promising not to is another story.”

Michelle on the Debates

From the great Michelle Malkin:

First, I would like to see all the Sarah doubters and detractors in the Beltway/Manhattan corridor eat their words.

Eat them.

Sarah Palin is the real deal. Five weeks on the campaign trail, thrust onto the national stage, she rocked tonight’s debate.

She was warm, fresh, funny, confident, energetic, personable, relentless, and on message. She roasted Obama’s flip-flops on the surge and tea-with-dictators declarations, dinged Biden’s bash-Bush rhetoric, challenged the blame-America defeatism of the Left, and exuded the sunny optimism that energized the base in the first place.

McCain has not done many things right. But Sarah Palin proved tonight that the VP risk he took was worth it.

Her performance also underscored the underhandedness of the hatchet job editors at ABC News and CBS News, which failed to capture her solid competence on the whole array of foreign and domestic policy issues on the debate table tonight. (I didn’t care for all the “greed” rhetoric, but I understand they are trying to appeal to independents and Dems. They’re trying to win the election.)

Pause to reflect on this: She matched — and trumped several times — a man who has spent his entire adult life on the political stage, run for president twice, and as he mentioned several times, chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Sarah Palin looked presidential.

Joe Biden looked tired.

Sarah made history.

Biden is history.

VP Debate: Biden Gets Many Facts Wrong

Biden Factually Incorrect:

Biden said: McCain voted on the same way on the budget resolution as Obama did. [FALSE]

Answer: Those votes were held on 3/14 and 6/4, McCain votes no, Obama voted yes. In that resolution, there is a provision calling for a tax increase starting on people making as low $42,000/year.

Biden said: Under Obama people will not pay more taxes than they did under Reagan. [FALSE]

Answer: The top rate under Reagan was 28% and under Clinton it was 39.5% … Obama wants to increase it to 39.5%

Biden said: It would take at least ten years to get any oil from new production. [FALSE]

Answer: Not true, it would take a year or two in some instances.

Biden said: The “Use of Force” resolution was NOT a war resolution / authorization for war. [FALSE]

Answer: Yes it was.

Biden said: McCain voted the same way Obama did with funding the troops. [FALSE]

Answer: Look at the final passage vote, McCain voted yes, Obama voted no to funding the troops.

Biden said: The United States spends more in three weeks in Iraq as we have in the past seven years in Afghanistan. [FALSE]

Answer: That is inaccurate – no spending figures support that assertion.

Biden said: That Article I of the Constitution refers to the Executive branch. [FALSE]

Answer: Article I refers to the Legislative Branch – (and he graduated from law school and serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee in charge of the federal courts)

Biden said: He said there was a windfall profits tax in Alaska. [FALSE]

Answer: No there is no such tax.

Biden said: McCain opposed President Clinton on Bosnia. [FALSE]

Answer: Incorrect

Biden said: Pakistan could hit Israel with a nuclear missle. [FALSE]

Answer: Pakistan is 2,198 miles away from Israel, their longest range missle has a range of 1200 miles.

Sounds Like Socialism Quote of the Night: “We don’t call it redistribution we call that ‘fairness’.” – Joe Biden

– AP

Biden – Palin Halfway Point

TBV readers,

It looks as though Palin is succeeding at putting Biden on the defensive. She took command early letting Ifill and Biden know that she won’t always be answering what they want her to answer b/c she is speaking to the American people. Great focus on energy policy, defended McCain’s health care plan, and held her own on the financial bailout. As we enter the foreign policy portion of the debate, she is aggressive and holding her own … Biden should be owning this area … should is the key word. She is doing a good job coming across as a middle class mom, plain and simple. She isn’t pretending she knows everything, but is clearly articulating her position. As an aside, she keeps congratulating Biden for correcting or disagreeing with Obama over the past few months (pre-VP pick), and she is doing so on multiple policy issues – he is starting to not like it.

– AP

More Pre-game Armchair Quarterbacking

This time from Jennifer Rubin of Pajamas via RCP:

First, she needs to take it to her opponent on what is supposed to be Joe Biden’s greatest strength: foreign policy. She’s no Henry Kissinger but she can remind viewers that Biden championed the unworkable Iraq partition idea and opposed the surge. But it is in Biden’s criticism of Barack Obama that she might really score points. Biden after all inveighed against Obama’s vote to cut off funding for the troops in Iraq and was critical of his promise to meet unconditionally with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Between Biden and Obama they have supported just about every bad national security idea (e.g., opposition to Kyl-Lieberman, endless talks with Iran, opposition to FISA) in the last eight years. Palin can make that point.

Second, she should use Biden’s “higher taxes are patriotic” to do what McCain didn’t do enough of in his own debate: hone in on the dangers of a tax increase during a recession and suggest that if Obama is really bent on all that domestic spending many more people than the “rich” will get a tax hike. Why, with the Fed and Treasury madly trying to pump liquidity into the private sector, would Obama suck it back out with a tax hike? It’s illogical and bad economics.

Third, she needs to pin the “insider” label back on the Obama-Biden ticket. There are plenty of earmarks to point to — both by Biden and by Obama (nearly a billion in just the few years he has been there). But the real looming issue is why neither of them set about blowing the whistle on the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae fiasco in the making. It was the Obama-Biden duo and their Democratic allies who took gobs of money from Freddie and Fannie and then blocked any meaningful reform. If all else fails, Palin should give viewers directions to view this film detailing the willful indifference, and indeed obstructionism, of the Democrats. Or she can quote Bill Clinton for the proposition that the Democrats have a lot to answer for. In short, she needs to use the platform of the debate to tie the Obama-Biden ticket to their Congressional colleagues and, in turn, to the debacle of Congressional mismanagement and malfeasance.

Fourth, she can talk with authority on energy policy. Why do the Democrats oppose domestic drilling and why aren’t we developing resources at home rather than importing oil, which for the foreseeable future will be a vital part of our energy supply? And yes, it is probably a good idea to bring up that clean coal gaffe.

And, finally, on a stylistic level Palin needs to get into the weeds and show some familiarity, not just with catchphrases, but with the particulars of McCain’s own program. As for her lack of foreign policy experience, she should be frank: all she has to offer is judgment, belief in a foreign policy based on the principles enunciated by Ronald Reagan, and a determination to take whatever measures are needed to prevail in the war on terror. (She might even use her newness to the national scene to her advantage: “I’m new at this Joe but I fail to see why Osama bin Laden should be given habeas corpus rights when not even the Nazis at Nuremberg got those protections.”)

Ifill’s Cousin Finds Palin Offensive

Tim Graham at Newsbusters notes:

Here are more signs Sarah Palin could face an uphill battle with PBS host Gwen Ifill. Professor Sherrilyn Ifill of the University of Maryland Law School, whom Gwen Ifill has lauded as “my brilliant baby cousin,” has written that black women are not buying Sarah Palin’s “false claims to feminism” and is portrayed as too perfect: “when women who are privileged present as though they have it all together, it’s offensive to black women.”

I am sure the whole family is unbiased.