Harris and Allen Nail it

For once, The Politico's founding duo get it exactly right. Their take on the debate last night is the fairest I've seen. Here are some excerpts (with an emphasis on Palin's performance):

Millions of Americans were watching Thursday night’s vice presidential debate, waiting for a demolition derby moment — another crash by GOP running mate Sarah Palin, another serving of raw material for the writers at "Saturday Night Live." By that standard, she got out alive, though there were white-knuckle moments along the way: questions that were answered with painfully obvious talking points that betrayed scant knowledge of the issue at hand and sometimes little relevance to the question that had been asked. . . .

[I]t is hard to count any objective measures by which Biden did not clearly win the encounter. She looked like she was trying to get people to take her seriously. He looked like he was running for vice president. His answers were more responsive to the questions, far more detailed and less rhetorical. On at least 10 occasions, Palin gave answers that were nonspecific, completely generic, pivoted away from the question at hand, or simply ignored it: on global warming, an Iraq exit strategy, Iran and Pakistan, Iranian diplomacy, Israel-Palestine (and a follow-up), the nuclear trigger, interventionism, Cheney's vice presidency and her own greatest weakness.

Asked which is a greater threat, a nuclear Pakistan or a nuclear Iran, Palin seemed to be stalling, or writing a term paper, when she said: “An armed, nuclear armed especially Iran is so extremely dangerous to consider.”

Biden was crisper, with a dose of realism: “Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be very, very destabilizing. They are more than — they are not close to getting a nuclear weapon that's able to be deployed.” Biden relentlessly and clearly delivered a specific message he had been assigned to hammer home: McCain-Palin would be four more years of Bush-Cheney. Biden mentioned President Bush more than a dozen times. "Look, past is prologue, Gwen," he said at one point. "The issue is, how different is John McCain's policy going to be than George Bush's? I haven't heard anything yet."

By contrast, Palin was in much more of a survival mode, barely delivering on her advisers' hopes that she would be aggressive with Biden, throwing gaffes and policies back at him. For the Alaska governor, it was policy as a second language — adequate but not enlightening. She twice referred to the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, as "McClellan." Biden did not correct her.

Washington power lawyer Robert Barnett, who helped Biden prepare, said viewers would come away with the sense that Palin "is a nice person, an interesting person but not a qualified-to-be-the-president-of-the-United-States person." Biden, he said, "was anecdotal, was a little bit emotional" and showed "professionalism, preparation and knowledge." . . .

The Obama campaign got a good laugh out of her answer about when nuclear weapons should be put into play: "Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet, so those dangerous regimes, again, cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, period."

The "be-all, end-all" is already a punch line around Washington. Asked about the role of the vice president, Biden was comfortable, after discussing the issue with the boss, to say: "I would be the point person for the legislative initiatives in the United States Congress for our administration."

Palin's answer was more abstract and obscure: "We have a lot of flexibility in there, and we'll do what we have to do to administer very appropriately the plans that are needed for this nation." And she had at least a couple of harp-seal-on-the-ice moments, as when she wandered into this sentence when trying to rebut a point Biden had made on energy: “That is not so, but because that's just a quick answer, I want to talk about, again, my record on energy — your ticket's energy ticket also. I think that this is important to come back to, with that energy policy plan, again, that was voted for in '05.”