With the minutes ticking down to what many are calling the most important Vice Presidential debate in American history, The Politico reports that Republican Vice Presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin’s new strategy is to go after Biden — bigtime:
Sarah Palin plans to go on the attack in tonight’s debate, hitting Joe Biden for what she will call his foreign policy blunders and penchant for adopting liberal positions on taxes and other issues, according to campaign officials involved in prepping her for tonight’s showdown.
The Palin camp is projecting surprising self-confidence in the pre-debate hours, despite the vice presidential nominee’s uneven — and, at some points, peculiar — performances in recent television interviews, the officials say. Top advisers to John McCain privately say Palin’s recent CBS interview was a borderline disaster, especially since it played out in several segments over several days. Tonight will be different, they say.
“This is going to finally put her back into a position where we see her like we saw her the first couple weeks,” a McCain official said. “She was herself. She was authentic, and people related to that. … Tonight, she’ll get into a rhythm. You’re going to see her in a way that you haven’t seen her yet.”
Meanwhile, Biden, Mike Allen goes on, plans a more “prosecutorial” approach, heavy on specific facts.
These are interesting strategies but the key to this debate will be whether either or both candidates are going to be allowed to get away with offering only packaged responses, or whether the moderator’s questions and follow-ups will force them to respond in ways that aren’t the result of Palin and Biden having been huddled with advisers preparing sound-bite zingers, vocal intonation, body postures and facial expressions.
But Palin does have a game plan, according to The Politico:
From her debate playbook, as described by McCain officials:
— Throw Biden’s own words back at him.
“There’s going to be a lot of opportunities to use Joe Biden’s words against him — and not his gaffes,” an official said. “When he says raising taxes is patriotic, that’s a policy position. That’s what he believes. She’s going to use those against him.”
— Highlight past Biden foreign-policy positions as a way to undermine his core strength.
“He’s a celebrated foreign policy expert, but he has been wrong … dating back to the Reagan administration,” the official said. “There are opportunities there for her to jump in.”
One example that was provided was Biden’s reference to North Korea as “a paper tiger” on CBS’s “The Early Show” in 2006. (“I would rather have seen it do exactly what it did, demonstrate to the whole world that it is in fact a paper tiger.”)
Another example noted by the campaign was voting for defense cuts during the Reagan administration, and voting against the first Gulf war in 1991. (PolitiFact.com points out that he voted with the majority of Senate Democrats on the resolution.)
— Highlight places where Biden and Barack Obama have differed, including primary-season statements about Obama’s readiness to lead and his positions on Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.
“He voted for the Iraq war, and Obama said that was poor judgment,” the official. “There are a lot of wedge positions between Obama and Biden.”
—Portray herself as a working mom and outsider who’s been in the real-world, rather than being shielded in the bluster of Washington.
Will it work?
The first question is whether what she does shores up where Palin has suffered erosion in polls. If the McCain campaign’s goal is to shore up her popularity with the conservative base, this may work. But if the thrust of the attack is that Biden is a liberal there are a lot of independent voters sick of the politics of political ideological demonization and labels. Will this appeal to some of the women voters who originally supported Palin but began to peel away?
Also: anyone who watched CNN or read the post Obama-McCain debate stories knows that McCain got negative reactions when he went on strong attack or got sarcastic against Obama.
The second question: is Palin the one to watch and is this her night? Or is Biden the one to watch since he can slip and make himself an issue? If he’s under attack, will he overreact? Will Biden taken the bait? And any political analyst (professional or otherwise) knows that Palin will come equipped with zinger about Biden talking down to her, ready to use if he gives her an opening.
The biggest question: will viewers react to this debate on who makes the most sense on issues, whether it’s Biden or Palin? Or will it be yet another debate hinging on who came across as such and such, or a statement that triggers a new and old media firestorm for days that obscures such tiny issues such as who sounds better on how to get the U.S. out of its economic mess?
UPDATE: A debating expert predicts Palin will go on the attack:
There’s a lot of credibility on the line for tomorrow’s vice presidential debate, and a top debate expert at Emory predicts that Republican nominee Sarah Palin’s strategy will include plenty of attacks on Democratic opponent Joe Biden’s positions.
“My guess is that from a strategy point of view, it’s better to attack your opponent’s position than to worry about going into too much depth on your own positions,” says Melissa Maxcy Wade, executive director of forensics and head of Emory’s Barkley Forum.
“We call these generic arguments in debate,” says Wade. “If you can practice attacking opponent’s position, you can make people focus on that and put less focus on your own positions.”
Wade is one of only three university debate coaches in the United States who has served on the National Associated Press Presidential Debate Evaluation Panel for every U.S. presidential election since 1976. She says she is relishing this week’s debate like no other. “I’m fascinated to watch this.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.