This was McCain's notable failure (more than once) in the first presidential debate.

Reality check — for those who watched and listened, or who just listened, in both debates so far, which candidates made you wince or say, “No, no” upon hearing something poor that was said? In my case it was McCain and Palin who triggered this.

The _real_ shocker, for intelligent people observing the debate, was when Biden said he and Obama wanted to let judges rewrite terms and conditions of home loans, to be able to not only reduce interest but also the _principal_. This is outright Third World political-risk brazen theft as well as obvious loser-vote-buying. Who is their prospective treasury secretary, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, or the Iranian revolutionary government of the early 1980s?

(Biden also appealed to envy and resentment by pushing for progressive taxation on the fictitious, dishonest basis of “fairness” a la Cambridge, MA — Berkeley East.)

Palin failed to score a moral and fiscal knockout on the loan issue (she changed the subject back to energy policy, a real blunder) and said nothing on the “fairness” lie. Those constituted two moments of demerit by Palin. (Same for shallow statements and McCain-debate-style repeated sound bites.) Palin was the better of the two from the start of the debate until her blunder, and at that point Biden stopped playing it safe and became more animated and said more of more value. The Dems should “let Biden be Biden,” turn him loose even if there may still be a risk of gaffes (which may now be seen as less of a risk than before).

Palin was poised last night. I'll give her that. But she stuck to her talking points instead of digging into the issues. She relied on soundbites over substance and she evaded a lot of direct questions to continue talking about the few areas where she does have some experience. And her kill-em-with-kindness folksiness may have won over some people, but the seemingly forced, false nature of it made my skin crawl.

Putting that aside, I found Palin's answers on gay rights more vague than others did. She's tolerant. That's fine. That's the standard conservative line: I tolerate gays and have gay friends, but I oppose this and that legal protection for them.

It all depends on how far she's willing to go with the last bit about hospital visitation laws and related things. For instance, does that actually mean she'd support some form of civil recognition not called marriage which grants all the legal rights of marriage? Or does it mean something much different than that? It wasn't at all clear to me.

I think Palin screwed up on McCain's position… “But in that tolerance also, no one would ever propose, not in a McCain-Palin administration, to do anything to prohibit, say, visitations in a hospital or contracts being signed, negotiated between parties.”'

McCain believes that the challenges facing same-sex couples can be solved if gay and lesbian couples enter into contracts…. and it is through these contracts that gay and lesbian couples can gain the same rights as married straights.