A sober reaction

Nice work by Sarah Palin. She was strong, confident, quirky and cute. She winked and smiled and used endearing colloquialisms. She made the audience laugh when she gave "shout-outs" to third graders, and crap like that. Most importantly, she managed to do it for over an hour, without really saying anything about policy. Ultimately, that was all she needed to claim success; and she did it with the combined power of her strange bouffant-bang-mullet headpiece.

Joe Biden is a pretty uninteresting, old-school politician. It does not help that the man has no color whatsoever, reminding me of Jack Nicholson finally reposed in The Shining. He should dye his eyebrows or something.

Biden was able to say more about policy, but most of it was terrifying to me personally. Bombing Bosnia was not my idea of a humanitarian intervention, and the fact that we aren't sinking billions of dollars into Afghanistan like we are in Iraq strikes me as a good thing. Finally the man mentioned LIHEAT, kitchen tables and so forth, to good effect.

People like who they like, and tend not to look generously at the other side. In principle, I like neither, so there is no similar conflict. I think Palin did more to rally her side than Biden, mainly because she held her own against a veteran and was less conventional in her deliveries. Biden, for his part, did not embarrass himself or his party, a big accomplishment. I don't know that either would have had a big impact on independents or undecideds. Some would have been drawn to Biden's "substance" and others to Palin's "charisma."

Not at all what I was expecting from Palin, and I must credit her for that.