The Cool Kid and the Brain...

I knew how it was going to go the minute Sarah Palin met Joe Biden and said "may I call you Joe"?

If we look back, I suspect we all remember the types from high school. The good looking popular girl with the 90210 smile and the shiny hair, personality plus, who glad-handed her way through every social setting. She was a slightly more intelligent version of Cher in Clueless.

She's good at that. She's really, really good at that. Still, at the end, I knew more about her dental work than her viewpoints on any important issues. She repeated the same tired refrains, again and again, because if she kept saying them, perhaps it would make it real. She was selling rather than informing.

A sticky point: I wish someone had coached her on how to pronounce "Ahmedinejad". It's Ah-meh-deen-uh-jahd, not Ackme-dinn-a-jahd. And "Israel" is not "Iz-reel". It's "Iz-rae-el". "Nuclear" is not "nukyuler". Noo-clee-er. Easy enough?

An ability to speak English well is one of the least expectations the country should have for those who will represent it in the world. Respect enough to learn how to pronounce the names of other world leaders is also an important part of diplomacy.

Her views on foreign policy issues are something I would have expected to hear during the Cold War, switching the names and concepts to "Andropov" and "Soviet aggression". The rhetoric was the same.

Joe Biden, on the other hand, came across as the studious one, the guy who always knew his facts and had joined the Debate Team. He was well-coached, intelligent and clear. He was professional.

That doesn't mean I agreed with everything he said. It simply means he presented it well. I would rather have him in front of world leaders.

If nothing else, watching last night did bring me one (as Hayley Mills said in a movie many years ago) "scathingly brilliant idea".

If Sarah Palin wants so much to be in the White House, perhaps she would accept a position as Banquet Greeter.

Then she'd be in her element.

Any opinions? Disagreements? Agreements?

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Debate night....

It's debate night.

This is going to be an interesting one. Ordinarily I don't watch these things because it's all so much showmanship and transparent manipulation that it bores me silly.

Still... this one could be good!

Will you be watching?

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