Palin vs. Biden: Prime-time showdown

This is the night that political junkies - and there are millions and millions of you out there this year - have been waiting for.

At 9 p.m., Sarah Palin and Joseph R. Biden Jr. meet in their one and only debate of the campaign season, at Washington University in St. Louis.

While the focus will be on the Republican far more than on the Democrat, both candidates have a lot to prove.

Palin, who remains extremely popular with the GOP base, will be out to show she has the depth of knowledge required of a would-be president - after doing television interviews that have generated ridicule from liberal commentators (as well as late-night comedians) and angst among some conservatives.

A poll released yesterday showed the degree to which the public's view of the Alaska governor has soured since her well-received speech at the Republican convention.

Immediately after the convention, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that Americans considered Palin "qualified" to be vice president, 52 percent to 39 percent. In the new survey, completed Monday, the verdict was "not qualified," 51 percent to 37 percent.

"To argue that she's not qualified is something I categorically reject," Republican presidential candidate John McCain told newspaper editors in Iowa on Tuesday.

Biden, who remains the all-but-forgotten man of the 2008 campaign, will be out to prove himself an asset to the Democratic ticket - by demonstrating command of the issues, avoiding any appearance of condescension toward Palin, and keeping his brain ahead of his sometimes too-quick mouth.

In an interview last week, for instance, Biden bungled the history of the Great Depression, saying that President Franklin Roosevelt went on television after the stock-market crash to buck up people's spirits. In fact, Herbert Hoover was president at the time of the crash, and commercial television hadn't started.

"I think what Joe Biden is going to do is what he's done for us throughout his time as the vice presidential nominee," Barack Obama's communications director, Robert Gibbs, said in a television interview this week, "and go out there and make the case for change."

The format for their meeting could help protect both candidates from themselves; it forces them to keep their answers short.

Under the rules, moderator Gwen Ifill of PBS will ask the questions, which can be about any topic. Each candidate will have 90 seconds to respond with a two-minute conversation to follow. In the presidential debate last Friday between McCain and Obama, answers lasted two minutes and the conversation five.

Ifill's credentials for hosting the debate were questioned yesterday by several conservatives, Rush Limbaugh included. He alleged that Ifill has an economic interest in an Obama victory because it would help sales of her forthcoming book, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. But McCain told Fox News he was confident that Ifill would do a "completely objective" job.

The candidates have spent most of recent days in the company of top campaign aides preparing for tonight.

Palin's prep work started in New York last week, continued over a long weekend in Philadelphia, and wound up with three days at McCain's vacation house in Sedona, Ariz. In a photo from Arizona, McCain foreign-policy adviser Randy Scheunemann appeared to be taking on the role of Biden.

For his part, Biden did most of his rehearsing at his house near Wilmington, with Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm playing Palin. He traveled to Capitol Hill yesterday to vote on the economic rescue bill.

While Biden has been virtually silent the last few days, Palin called in to conservative radio shows Tuesday and yesterday.

When host Hugh Hewitt asked her why she thought her candidacy had generated so much hostility on the left and from some in the media, she replied, "Oh, I think they're just not used to someone coming in from the outside saying: You know what? It's time that normal Joe six-pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency."

Yesterday, she told host Sean Hannity that she looked forward to the debate, "getting to speak directly to Americans, without that filter of mainstream media trying to, I think, maybe censor some of my comments."

Coming into tonight's encounter, the Republicans are in need of something to give them a spark. Ever since the financial crisis began nearly three weeks ago, all of the political indicators have been moving in Obama's direction. He now leads McCain by an average of 5 percentage points in national polls. And the numbers in battleground states have shown a strong Democratic trend.

New state polls from the Quinnipiac Polling Institute yesterday have Obama ahead 15 points in Pennsylvania, 8 in Ohio, and 8 in Florida.

Other surveys have shown Obama's lead in Pennsylvania in the 6-to-7-point range and the contest virtually even in Ohio and Florida.

Another new set of polls, from CNN/Time/Opinion Research, had Obama up 4 in Florida, 11 in Minnesota, 1 in Missouri, 4 in Nevada, and 9 in Virginia.

It's not clear how much impact, if any, tonight's debate will have; generally, people wind up voting for the top of the ticket with little regard for running mates.

Even after what was arguably the most lopsided vice presidential debate - the one in 1988 in which Democrat Lloyd Bentsen told Republican Dan Quayle that he was "no Jack Kennedy" - the Republican ticket headed by George H.W. Bush won comfortably.

The TV audience tonight is likely to exceed the estimated 52.4 million who watched the Obama-McCain debate, a number kept down by the uncertainty over whether the event would happen and by its being scheduled on a Friday night.

Future Presidential Debates

Tuesday at Belmont University, Nashville, 9 p.m.

Oct. 15 at Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y., 9 p.m.EndText