I am not sure what this person was watching.

She was smart, she was relaxed, and was in charge of the debate.

Look, if the debate was all about Alaska’s oil supply and Wasilla, she cleaned Biden’s clock. But it was not. That’s why she lost control right around the time it shifted to foreign policy and she brought Alaska oil into Darfur.

This viewer must have thought he was watching an Alaska gubernatorial debate:

The line of the night will be “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” Palin was willing to break with the GOP and show how Biden and Obama have not ever broken with the Democrats.

She was smiling, gregarious, and clearly enjoying the night.

This analysis needs some more evidence to substantiate it.

She was warm, fresh, funny, confident, energetic, personable, relentless, and on message. She roasted Obama’s flip-flops on the surge and tea-with-dictators declarations, dinged Biden’s bash-Bush rhetoric, challenged the blame-America defeatism of the Left, and exuded the sunny optimism that energized the base in the first place.

McCain has not done many things right. But Sarah Palin proved tonight that the VP risk he took was worth it.

Palin never addressed just how McCain would be different from Bush hence an agent of any palpable change. That’s the tie to Bush and that’s the issue. How could one blind themselves to that? Appalling people actually get paid to post such thoughtless, pandering tripe. Apparently this columnist missed Obama’s stances on all of the above at the first debate. Nice straw-man, but as weak as the McCain campaign’s marketing to so many thoughtless lemmings eagerly lapping up a reason to write and spew their vile lies everywhere.

This reaction is basically how the Miami Dolphins fans felt when the Dolphins beat the Baltimore Ravens last year - their only win.

Final thought before all the spin: Palin just wiped the floor with Biden tonight. It wasn’t even close. Biden had his moments, but there’s a reason why his presidential runs went over like lead balloons. Biden was pure Washington, Palin was pure Main Street. She performed brilliantly with a deck stacked against her, which for someone who has never done this before is quite a feat.

Not that this was a win, but that the bar was so low on Palin that any evidence of competence would garner such enthusiasm. She was not all that bad and even good at times, quite good. But these partisan reactions are mere hyperbole and quite uncritically blind; as erratically uncompromising (yes that’s an oxymoron) as their supposed default candidate choice.

This seems to suggest that we should vote for charisma and charm and not focus in anyway how the candidate actually focused on the issues that address the actual questions asked. Nor should we vote based on how that candidate would work in the proposed administration for which they are running. The difference is that Biden addressed the role of Vice President. Sarah Palin is still stuck in Alaska and simply cannot differentiate her primary running mate from the current administration which they are now eschewing and avoiding any relationship. Remember that the only error she believes Cheney committed was to shoot a friend while hunting because it was an accident. I am still not sure she has a grasp of what “a VP” does beyond her “lame joke”/inquiry.