Pit bull bites Biden

Charles Hurt:

JOE Biden tiptoed out on stage last night wondering whether he'd face a lady pitifully out of her depth or the lipstick end of a pit bull.

He found out real fast.

Biden's striped-pants Washington wonk talk ran into a regular American who looked like a lady, talked like a hockey mom and smacked him around like a cat playing with a mouse.

"Oh, man, it's so obvious that I'm a Washington outsider and someone just not used to the way you guys operate," Sarah Palin said in her arctic accent and a tone of utter disbelief.

Biden - the Senate's reigning foreign-policy expert - had just given a long explanation for how he voted in favor of invading Iraq but didn't really mean for President Bush to invade Iraq. And how he knew it would be a very long war and a very difficult war but now opposes the war because it's been too long and too difficult.

As the debate began, Biden smiled broadly a lot, watching his opponent with open curiosity - as if unsure how exactly to handle this hissing mongoose without soiling his pin-striped suit.

So unsure that when he accidentally called her "Sarah Palin," he corrected himself in a sweat: "Gov. Palin."

By the time Biden figured out that he was debating nothing short of an icy china doll with a switch-blade, it was too late.

"Your plan is a white flag of surrender in Iraq," she said fiercely. "And that is not what our troops need to hear today, that's for sure."

And while Palin talked like smiling - but p.o'd - hockey moms across America, Biden wooed the people with lines like: "Past is prologue."

That's one for the Congressional Record.

...

Actually Biden's "Past is prologue" remark was a weak response to her zinger "There you go again, looking backwards instead of forwards" after Biden had tried to tie her campaign to President Bush. It was one of her many effective rejoinders.

One of the more laughable statements I have seen commenting on the debate is the NY Times television reviewer who said that Biden did not make any mistakes. The fact is that he made as many as 12 factual errors, but he said them with such authority that like Katie Couric when Biden was rewriting the history of the Great Depression just assumed he knew what he was talking about.