Well, tonight we proved that debating on national TV is likely to make you nervous. Both candidates were imperfect and awkward. Palin dodged most of the questions and Biden was solid but non-confrontational. I liked what I heard from Biden and I suspect Republicans felt like Palin salvaged their ticket by not puking on stage or falling off her high heels. After watching Palin for 90 minutes, I think I've seen enough cartoon character winks at the camera to send me for the antacid. Biden won me over (okay, I admit I was already a fan).

The first thing we really learned is that the moderator allowed these candidates to simply regurgitate their stump speeches. It would have been nice to see a few overhand pitches, but we got nothing but change-ups right down the middle of the plate. I guess the norm for debates will now be to ignore the moderator and simply read off the prepared notes. The second thing we learned is that Tbone Pickens is spending millions of dollars to convince Americans to spend billions on domestic drilling and moving our fossil fuel addiction from one scare resource (oil) to another (natural gas). Both sources make him a wealthy man and he's not afraid to throw in a brief illusion of wind, solar, and hydrogen as the worlds most expensive slight of hand marketing campaign. Sorry Tbone, I'm looking behind the curtain and there's nothing but fossil fuels up your sleeve. It isn't enough to move off foreign fossil fuels, we need to be off of ALL fossil fuels and we can do it right now if we can remove oil company influence in Washington. If there is a debate scheduled you can be sure that oil companies are going to buy up all the advertising space. It almost feels like Pickens is one of the candidates (McCain certainly has a lot of his money).

I suspect independents completely checked out after hearing 90 minutes of negative attacks. That could have hurt Biden who clearly landed more solid punches. I would score it a huge victory for Biden on debate points, while Palin exceeded the expectations (that means all she had to do was sound slightly better than Paris Hilton) and solidified her shrinking base of religious extremists and Rush Limbaugh fans by spewing prepared cold war era jargon.