Sam Boyd

My wrap-up is below. Also see Adam on Gwen Ifill‘s moderating, Palin’s identity politics, and her banality. Ezra‘s liveblogging is here, including some final thoughts. Isaac Chotiner rounds up the insta-polls, which show Biden winning. Matt Yglesias downplays the expectations game. Josh Marshall argues that Palin did better than she has in interviews because Ifill […]

Palin managed to meet the absurdly low expectations she faced going into the debate. But, judged by any actual objective measure, I think it’s hard to deny that Biden made far more substantive points about John McCain. And that’s the other key difference between the two — Palin attacked Biden, Biden attacked McCain. Biden realized, […]

Joe Biden just defended Obama‘s plan to raise taxes on people who make over $250,000 a year. Sarah Palin responded that this meant raising taxes on small businesses. This is the kind of thing that you get in trouble with if you don’t understand your own talking points. She was supposed to say that tax […]

McCain just said Pakistan was a failed state before Musharraf. It wasn’t. That is all. –Sam Boyd

John McCain will debate Obama tonight, despite previously claiming he’d only do so if a bailout deal had been reached. If he caves this easily, how can we trust him to stand up to the terrorists? –Sam Boyd

It’s hard for me to believe that McCain couldn’t have made a better pick than Palin after watching this projectile nonsense (see Ezra for a fuller analysis): Bobby Jindal might not have generated quite as big an initial bump as Palin, for example, but he certainly would have generated public interest and pleased the base […]

Reading all the reactions to Sarah Palin‘s speech, two things stand out for me. First, the McCain campaign seems to have decided that the way to salvage Palin as a VP pick is to turn her into a pure base-energizing attack dog. By having her give a speech so thoroughly devoted to vicious attacks on […]

Brad Plumer has more on the fact that Palin is pretty much lying when she says she opposed the bridge to nowhere: So she was very much for the bridge and seemed to be saying that Alaska had to act quickly — Ted Stevens and Don Young might not be in the majority much longer […]

Chris Hayes has a great find: Very quickly. Remember when Pat Buchanan ran a number of hard-right, fringe campaigns for president in the late 1980s, 1990s and 2000? Well, guess who was supporting him: From an AP report in 1999: “Pat Buchanan brought his conservative message of a smaller government and an America First foreign […]

I was going to give it a rest with the AP-bashing, but over at Language Log, the Web’s best linguistics blog (or at least the only one I read), Mark Liberman has a great post taking apart the psuedo-scientific analysis of Hillary Clinton‘s speech performed by the AP’s Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier: I think […]