Vice Presidential Debate Preview

Are you not sure you know enough about the Vice Presidential candidates, Joe Biden and Sarah Palin? You may want to look at this review from Good.is.

Sarah Palin doesn't need to not make mistakes, she needs to convince people she is competent to be president. This is not easy given the Katie Couric interview that has been released in snippets over the last week. She won't all of a sudden become a policy wonk, so she has to show leadership abilities in another way.

Here is how I think it will play out:

Palin will go on the attack right from the start. She will say very little about McCain's policies other than high level glossy concepts like the fact they are "The New Energy". Going negative may be their only hope at this point and it has always been the best course for her in this debate with Joe Biden. She needs to get Biden off balance and tempt him into unleashing a verbal tirade against her.

Biden will look like my dog when our daughter has dropped food on the floor and he is told to sit at attention. A massive dissonance between instinct and training. Look for Biden after a Palin attack to be biting his lip, shaking, tapping his foot or some other quirk as he wants to rip her apart but knows he shouldn't. He should daydream about walking along beautiful beaches all over the world visiting foreign leaders as the Vice President of the United States. If the worst that can be said about Joe Biden was that he seemed distant, that would play a lot better than "he verbally beat up a woman". he best tactic would be to find a way to let Palin talk some more. The format tonight provides for very short responses and provides few opportunities for the candidates to respond to one another. Biden should use the time to ask Palin a specific question and offer to give her the remainder of his time to respond. You can tell if Biden is starting to get flustered if you find yourself counting the number of times he begins a sentence with "Look...".

It will be interesting to see how things play out.

Unless Palin can start turning the Republican ship around, this is going to quickly turn into a rout. (That may not be in Obama's best interests, which we will cover in a few days). New polls show Obama leading in Florida by anywhere from 3% to 8%, Ohio by 8% and Virginia by 9%. John McCain needs to win all 3 of those states to have a chance to win. In other states where McCain was hoping to have a shot, he is now down by 1% to 4% in Nevada, 11% in Minnesota, 15% in Pennsylvania and 16% in Iowa. McCain is also only leading by 1% in Missouri, 2% in Indiana and is tied in North Carolina, all of which he needs to keep this from becoming a total wipeout.