Past is Prologue.

Tonight, as I watched the Vice Presidential debate, time and again I was reminded of the past. No, it was not from Joe Biden, who Sarah Palin accused of being focused on the past and not the future. To address that, I say that the reason we are in the bad situation we are now in both Iraq and with our economy is because the Bush Republicans ignored the lessons of the past. No, I was reminded of the past by Sarah Palin's performance. Her caricatured folksiness, her inability to answer the questions she was asked, her reliance on memorized talking points, her mispronunciation of all words including "nuclear," and her attempts to pretend she's "just like you" despite being wealthy and powerful; all of these things reminded me of George W. Bush's debates.

It was a joke on the Simpson's that, to paraphrase, you can't be "cool" if you tell people that you're "cool." Well, tonight, Sarah Palin repeatedly tried to tell us that she was "an average American," that she was a "maverick," and that she was "a Washington outsider." So again, if you have to tell people repeatedly that you're a maverick, then you probably aren't one, or else they would think it without you saying so. As I watched the debate, though, I thought Sarah Palin did well in one important respect: she played to her base. She played to the people who care only about her as a persona and not her as a politician. She played to those who care more about what a person says than what their record proves. She played to the people who hear only the buzz words and forget the substance.

If the bar is set so low for Sarah Palin that she'd have to stutter and fumble, then yes, she just cleared it. She may have mispronounced "nuclear,"" Iraq," and "Talibani" but she gave that folksy twang that will blind those people to the fact that she's a wealthy, powerful, Alaskan separatist who's in the pocket of oil interests and other lobbyists. To think on substance, however, she had none. She repeated over and over that we had to take on "the greed of Wall Street" and that she came from a "team of mavericks," but nowhere in there did she state what they would do if they were elected, how they would be different from George W. Bush, or how she came to her false conclusions about the policies of Barack Obama an Joe Biden. Unfortunately, well the dust settles, though the news media will report the misstatements (or flat-out lies) she made, it will already be too late, and all people will remember is that she said Barack Obama voted against the troops.

By the one hour mark, though, she was winded and Joe Biden was just getting started. He called her out on her distortions of his record. He called her out on McCain's record. He called her out on the fact that she is not the only one on that stage who understands the needs of families. When he spoke so eloquently, in response to her harsh negativity, and choked up about knowing what it's like to struggle to care for your family, she responded without even an acknowledgement, going right into another prepared talking point that didn't even address the question.

Ultimately, I think much of the blame for the fact that she was allowed to ignore the substance and dodge the questions falls on the moderator, who seemed to haphazardly employ the rules of the debate, asking a series of questions but never seeking followup or allowing a chance for the candidates to stay on a topic beyond a single response each, meaning that she could suddenly jump to a prepared talking point about taxes or Afghanistan without addressing either what was asked, or responding to Joe Biden.

My view of Sarah Palin's performance can be demonstrated by what she did at the end of the debate; she brought her whole family up on stage, including her infant son that should have been in bed by now. The child was tired and probably annoyed by all those lights, and after using him as a prop for photo ops, she passed him off to her youngest daughter, barely big enough to hold him, and went back to glad-handing. Sarah Palin is all about the photo op, and not about the substance. She's about getting in the sound bite and not answering the question. She's about looking like she's a good leader (or a good mother) and not about being one. So when our country needs real leadership and real change, she'll keep us up past our bedtime, drag us through the political side show, and then pass us off onto cronies and people with even less experience. Well, Sarah Palin, I for one have been kept up way past my bedtime.