The Biden-Palin Panderfest

Okay, Sarah Palin didn't implode. Her sentences, however meandering, found their way to a period. Joe Biden doesn't have Tourette's Syndrome. Neither screwed up terribly in their one and only debate Thursday night. And Palin did far better than she's been doing in recent interviews where she left one longing for the gravitas of Dan Quayle.

But let's be honest. Both were dishonest in a fundamental sense. Both of these vice presidential candidates left the impression that they could offer a lot of benefits to the middle class. Biden, the Democrat, repeated the 95 percent of Americans getting a tax cut pledge from Barack Obama's campaign. Palin left a similar impression that she and Republican John McCain could bestow benefits on a beleaguered middle class.

The truth is this: Both candidates are going to have to chuck a lot of their promises. Those pledges were based on a pre-9/29 world view, the day the market crashed 778 points. We're clearly heading into a recession if we're not technically there. Federal revenues are going to plummet and the options of the next president are going to become more and more limited. And we've just added another $850 billion to the mix.

It's crazy to think that the promises are going to come through. That doesn't mean that there aren't important differences between the candidates. But the endless appeals to the middle class should have been tempered with the mess we find ourselves in and how the middle class will pay. It won't just be Exxon Mobil that picks up the tab for this party we've been throwing ourselves.

In terms of the overall impression they made, Palin came out like gangbusters, but seemed to run out of things to say and clearly didn't have Biden's command of the issues. Her bizarre proposal to expand the powers of the vice presidency was jarring. No one could have left that debate thinking Biden was unready to be president. You can't say the same for Palin.

Early polls show undecided voters overwhelmingly favored Biden. I think that might have been true no matter what happened tonight. The economic gyrations of the last two weeks, if not year, have been so unsettling that voters now seem overwhelmingly prepared to vote for the Obama-Biden ticket.

The news Thursday that McCain is pulling his campaign ads and staff out of Michigan, once a prime G.O.P. target of opportunity, a state that McCain won handily in 2000 against George W. Bush, shows how the economy's tumult has hurt McCain. The possibility of an Obama landslide now doesn't seem so far fetched. Odds are the race will tighten and there will be moments of voter doubt about the Democrat in the final weeks, some it for good reasons and some for baser ones.

But after two weeks of hellacious economic headlines, Obama seems far less risky than McCain. And Palin's inexperience seems more like a gamble. She had a good night, but not good enough. With the proviso that things can change, it still feels like Obama's to lose. The middle-class is in for a very rough ride, no matter who wins.

Matt Cooper

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