Post-Debate

Well, Kirby was right. "They both did fine," Mickey Kaus tells us. I fell asleep before the debate started but, like the first Obama-McCain debate, I got up very early to check the post-debate chatter. Once again, not as a dramatic as one had hoped.

CNN identified the "Say it ain't so, Joe" line as a canned sound bite she was waiting to use. I think they're right about that. Actually, she blew it by saying "Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again" turning into a reference to anothers (at the time appearantly) improvised jab. You can feel her coaches cringing. "'Say it ain't so, Joe,' would be a good line," they might have said to her, "Sort of like Reagan's 'There you go again'."

Of course, the canned line may have been simply, "It ain't so, Joe," which she was supposed to use to correct him on some important fact. That would have been a campaign-changing moment. That coaches may have said: "Say, 'It ain't so, Joe'".

To her credit, it looks like she knew she flubbed it right away. She ends up rambling, seeming somewhat distressed. And, as some people have noted, the views on education she presents here seem very liberal. Almost a gaffe: "Her reward is in heaven"??? As she was talking her way through this she reminded me of someone, and then I realized who it was: Edna Boil.

I know that isn't fair at all. But that's what she began to sound like to me.