The VP Debate: The Reviews Are In

"She wasn’t present. She wasn’t real. She was Sally Sound-byte. This debate was more revealing than the Presidential one last week because it became very clear that she simply doesn’t have the substance to be VP much less President which reflects badly on John McCain's judgment. Obama will crush McCain. Said that months ago. Truer than ever."
-Diane Francis, National Post

"For her part, GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin–speaking with the programmed cadence of a GPS navigation system—used forced folksiness to deliver crammed material in the manner of a high schooler looking to score a good grade on a Spanish test. The kid may escape with a B-minus, but he wouldn’t be able to order a cup of coffee in Spain a week later."
-Dougas Burns, Iowa Independent

"Sarah Palin's high-energy performance in the vice-presidential debate was the most glaring demonstration—since George W. Bush's performances in 2000—of how little you can get away with knowing and still survive one of these things, especially if the rules limit the cross-examination as severely as they did in this debate. Her relentless opacity was impressive. She refused to answer the questions where she hadn't been prepped with answers and when Biden pointed out that an early question had been on deregulation not taxes, she flashed: 'I may not answer the questions the way you and the moderator want to hear, but I'm gonna talk straight to the American people.' Talk straight she didn't, with only a few exceptions. She talked talking points. And when the talking points concerned areas where she didn't know diddly, she didn't talk them very convincingly. Indeed, there were times I got the distinct impression that she didn't understand the points she was talking about (on the vice president's constitutional powers, for example)."
-Joe Klein, Time

"She might have undone whatever good will she earned with her 'aw, shucks' Wasilla hockey mom ways, though, when she utterly failed to react after Biden choked up while discussing the death of his first wife and their daughter. Palin's response was ice cold: 'People aren't looking for more of the same. They are looking for change. And John McCain has been the consummate maverick in the Senate over all these years.'"
-Mike Madden, salon.com

"You can say this about Sarah Palin: She did better debating Joe Biden than she did being interviewed by Katie Couric. But that sets the bar very low indeed. So let's pay Palin the respect of treating her exactly as a male candidate would be treated. And that means saying this: She was simply nowhere near as good as Joe Biden."
-Scot Lehigh, Boston Globe

"To the contrary, it is hard to count any objective measures by which Biden did not clearly win the encounter. She looked like she 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 ten 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."
-John F. Harris and Mike Allen, Politico

For more reactions, go to Daily Kos's great round-up here.