Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Millions of Americans were watching Thursday night's vice presidential debate, waiting for a demolition derby moment — another crash by GOP running mate Sarah Palin, another serving of raw material for the writers at "Saturday Night Live."

By that standard, she got out alive, though there were white-knuckle moments along the way: questions that were answered with painfully obvious talking points that betrayed scant knowledge of the issue at hand and sometimes little relevance to the question that had been asked.

. . . [I]t is hard to count any objective measures by which Biden did not clearly win the encounter. She looked like she was trying to get people to take her seriously. He looked like he was running for vice president. His answers were more responsive to the questions, far more detailed and less rhetorical.

On at least 10 occasions, Palin gave answers that were nonspecific, completely generic, pivoted away from the question at hand, or simply ignored it: on global warming, an Iraq exit strategy, Iran and Pakistan, Iranian diplomacy, Israel-Palestine (and a follow-up), the nuclear trigger, interventionism, Cheney's vice presidency and her own greatest weakness.

Asked which is a greater threat, a nuclear Pakistan or a nuclear Iran, Palin seemed to be stalling, or writing a term paper, when she said: "An armed, nuclear armed especially Iran is so extremely dangerous to consider."

-- JOHN F. HARRIS and MIKE ALLEN

Sen. John McCain and his Republican allies are readying a newly aggressive assault on Sen. Barack Obama's character, believing that to win in November they must shift the conversation back to questions about the Democrat's judgment, honesty and personal associations, several top Republicans said.

With just a month to go until Election Day, McCain's team has decided that its emphasis on the senator's biography as a war hero, experienced lawmaker and straight-talking maverick is insufficient to close a growing gap with Obama. The Arizonan's campaign is also eager to move the conversation away from the economy, an issue that strongly favors Obama and has helped him to a lead in many recent polls.

-- MICHAEL D. SHEAR

McCain goes almost 100 percent negative. If that doesn't do something to the polls in the next week, what has he got left? The answer, I'm afraid, is nothing but his fathomless narcissism and vanity.

-- ANDREW SULLIVAN

[D]espite the rapture of college students and the registration of the homeless in Ohio, the common sense of Americans will override curiosity about Barack Obama and infatuation with his celebrity, and trust John McCain to pilot the country for the next four years. ... The hard left’s seven year rage against George Bush has disfigured the politics of the country, but it hasn’t infected the large center or demoralized the principled right.

-- HUGH HEWITT

Wrong. We have an economy that’s in or going into recession. Oh, and there's a massive financial meltdown going on that probably will still be having reprecussions come November. When the economy's tanking, the candidate of the incumbent party will typically lose unless he can turn the debate to an "insurgent" issue other than the economy on which he is aligned with the popular will and his opponent is strongly precommitted to an unpopular position.

-- PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said of Franklin D. Roosevelt that he had a "second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament." Obama has shown that he is a man of limited experience, questionable convictions, deeply troubling associations (Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Tony Rezko) and an alarming lack of self-definition -- do you really know who he is and what he believes? Nonetheless, he's got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president.

-- CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

I . . . implore conservatives to stop ignoring reality just because they happen to like a candidate’s personality and biography. Besides being bad for the quality of conservative thought, it embraces the caricature that conservatives are indifferent to knowledge and have no use for expertise, which has become an all too legitimate critique of how conservatives have responded to the misrule of the Bush administration.

That was not always the case, but if conservatives insist on making elaborate arguments that understanding and knowledge are not significant criteria when choosing our top elected officials they will lose whatever credibility they may still have.

More than that, they will be crippled by their embrace of cheerful ignorance when it comes time to oppose the policies of the Democratic administration that is surely about to be elected.

-- DANIEL LARISON

Cartoon by Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate