Palin in comparison

What was with the media's overwhelmingly positive spin following Sarah Palin's performance in the debate last night? I've never seen so much praise heaped on a politician who constantly ducked the questions at hand. She didn't even do so gracefully, as she bluntly, often awkwardly returned to her talking points, about which she generally offered no specifics. When she did try to get into specifics she tended to be incoherent or, at best, disingenuous, as when she talked about McCain's health care plan as something that would be good for (and god I'm coming to hate this phrase more than I can say) us “people on Main Street.”

On one channel she was lauded for telling America her story, her background as Mayor and Governor and about her areas of expertise (I must have blinked during that part), while on another channel she was given props for not focussing on herself but on McCain while Joe Biden was criticized for talking too much about himself. Again, not sure what these people were watching, Biden had the typical balance between talking about O'Bama's policy plans and his own take (and record) on the issues. Isn't it still important to hear the VPs' takes on things since they're going to be second in command and all?

At one point it was as if Palin thought she was an over-the-top version of Subliminal Man (“old” Kevin Nealon character on SNL) as she “slipped” the word “maverick,” in reference to her or/and McCain, into seemingly every other sentence. Sorry, maverick is a label not an argument; labels not only lack substance, but when used so much in self-reference, they should call into question the true intent of the person using them, like when someone repeats over and over how they're not a racist, it can be a pretty good indication that they are. The pundits (by a count of two-to-one based on the spin I watched last night ) were also impressed with her folksiness, with all of her practiced “Gosh darn its” and her aw shucksist style, it was almost Lynchian.

On my local news coverage, people were impressed with how she came across as an average American, someone who understood—oh yes—us people on Main Street, someone you could really sit and down and enjoy talking to. Sorry, haven't we already been saddled with eight years of someone elected largely because of his “average guy” appeal, because he's someone many voters saw as like them, someone whom they might sit down next to in a bar, have a beer and shoot the shit with? Anyway, none of this is, or should be at least, particularly insightful, but judging by what I saw on all of the channels last night, it's over the heads of most of the pundits.