Bring on Tina Fey
SO THIS is what they mean by the soft bigotry of low expectations. The weeklong drumbeat that led to the vice presidential debate suggested it would be a matchup between an airhead and a gaffe machine.
If you added up the two cents of every adviser, you could pay the national debt. For a week we'd seen the air of confidence come out of the balloon of Sarah Palin. She flunked the interview with Katie Couric. What she needed to do was to parse a sentence and come up with a fact. Or even a factoid.
On the other hand, Joe Biden had been given some advice that sounded like an inversion of the 1950s. Back then it was the smart woman who was told to play dumb. Now it was the smart man who was warned to keep his IQ under control. And to avoid patronizing like the plague.
Well, blessedly this turned out not to be Bobby Riggs vs. Billie Jean King. They were more surrogates for their candidates than their gender.
Sarah was Positively Sarah, as they used to say when she ran for mayor. Folksy, breezy, back on her mojo, full of anecdotes and on message. If this is what cramming looks like, she'd pulled the all-nighters and learned what Hamas was and to keep her syntax (mostly) in order. If every question didn't lead to an answer it led to an anecdote.
Joe was positively Joe. A few statistics too many, a rush against the 90-second deadline, but a solid strike at the central point. McCain's no maverick, he's more of the same.
In the end, in the psychodrama that is this election the big question was whether Palin could wipe out the image that had been put in the voters' hard drive over the last week. Tina Fey still looks more qualified.
Ellen Goodman can be reached at ellengoodman@globe.com. 