Gov. Sarah Palin made it through the vice presidential debate yesterday without doing any obvious damage to the Republican presidential ticket. By surviving her encounter with Sen. Joe Biden and quelling some of the talk about her basic qualifications for high office, she may even have done Sen. John McCain a bit of good, freeing him to focus on the other troubles shadowing his campaign.
It was not a tipping point for the embattled Republican presidential ticket, the bad night that many Republicans had feared. But neither did it constitute the turning point the McCain campaign was looking for after a weeks-long stretch in which Sen. Barack Obama seemed to be gaining the upper hand in the race.
Even if he no longer has to be on the defensive about Palin, McCain still faces a tough environment with barely a month until the election, as he acknowledged hours before the debate by effectively pulling his campaign out of Michigan, a Democratic state where McCain's advisers had once been optimistic of victory.
“This is going to help stop the bleeding,” said Todd Harris, a Republican consultant who worked for McCain in his first presidential campaign. “But this alone won't change the trend line, particularly in some of the battleground states.”
Short of a bravura performance that would have been tough for even the most experienced national politician to turn in – or a devastating error by the mistake-prone Biden, who instead turned in an impressively sharp performance – there might have been little Palin could have done to help McCain.
The McCain campaign has grimly confronted a series of polls since last week's presidential debate showing Obama gaining a lead not only nationally, but in battleground states.
The economic problems on Wall Street have posed a severe problem for McCain, moving the presidential debate to precisely the ground that favors Democrats, and Biden sought repeatedly during the debate to lay the problem at the doorstep of the Republican Party.
Even if a financial rescue plan is approved by Congress, there is no reason to think that the bad economic news is going to stop: with reports of bleak unemployment numbers, more stock market gyrations and the prospect of bad economic reports on everything from job losses to automobile sales.
“For more than a year, people assumed that if Obama was the Democratic nominee, the campaign would be a referendum on him,” Harris said. “The economic crisis changed that: the campaign is now a referendum on who can get us out of this mess. One of the challenges for the McCain campaign is going to be turn the race back into an up-or-down referendum on Obama.”
And through this period – easily the worst one McCain has faced since he was forced to lay off most of his campaign staff more than a year ago when he ran out of money – McCain has appeared off balance. He has been searching for a message and a way to make a case against Obama, and often publicly venting his frustration at the way the campaign is going, as he did this week in a contentious meeting with the editorial board of The Des Moines Register.
In last night's debate, Palin can presumably claim two victories, albeit modest ones. She did not offer a reprise of the unsteady responses that marked her interviews with Katie Couric on CBS News, even if many of her answers were not always responsive to the question, particularly when contrasted with Biden. Her performance – feisty and spirited – also might have heartened conservatives, many of whom had gone from ecstasy to despair in the period from when she was named the running mate until this week.
“Her performance re-energizes the conservative base,” said Nelson Warfield, a conservative Republican consultant. “Palin pierced the media's low expectations.”
A more conventional vice presidential candidate could have used the debate to go after Obama and turn this night into a referendum on Obama. Palin certainly tried, attacking Obama repeatedly for his views on national security and taxes, prompting passionate rebuttals from Biden.
But she had become such an outsized figure since her explosive introduction to the country by McCain that the story of this debate was always going to be about Palin, and not Obama. It seems fair to say that Americans who tuned in to this debate watched to get their impression of Palin, and not to hear what she had to say about Obama.
Election Day is about a month away, and if this presidential race follows typical patterns, people are now making decisions – and, again if this election is true to form, they will be making their choice between the two people at the top of the ticket.
Matthew Dowd, who was chief strategist for President Bush in 2004, recalled when he was working for Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, the Democratic vice presidential candidate in 1988, when he – by every account – beat Dan Quayle in that vice presidential debate.
“We were sitting in the audience, I was sitting between Al Gore and Dick Gephardt, and everyone was like, 'Oh that's, great, great,' ” Dowd said. “But it didn't matter anymore. You're 30 days or so out and people are starting to look at the presidential candidates. The race had formed.”
“You're in a race right now that is beginning to solidify into a 5 or 6 point Barack Obama lead,” he said. “And each day forward with lead holding is not a good day for McCain. It doesn't contribute to what they really need to do. They have just a little over 30 days to start to make up some serious ground, at a time when people are already starting to vote.”
That, Dowd said, was why an adequate performance from Palin last night fell short of what McCain needed and will likely be forgotten before the presidential candidates meet for their second debate Tuesday in Nashville, Tenn.
