In the wake of last evening’s vice presidential debate there’s been a good deal of praise of Governor Sarah Palin. She exceeded expectations, no matter those expectations were monumentally low after her performances in televised interviews with Katie Couric. She put Joe Biden on the defensive, though perhaps she merely flabbergasted him as she did me with some of the nonsensical things she said. She returned from the wilderness of media savagery as the authentic Sarah Palin, defending the authentic maverick, John McCain, his vision, and his program of reform. What vision? What program of reform?

I heard nothing in last evening’s debate that convinced me that Palin possesses either intellect or compassion. Her ability to think on her feet seemed limited to a not very trustworthy sense of where she was out of her depth and needed to fall back on a memorized talking point. Sometimes she got the talking points wrong, particularly if there were any long sentences to negotiate, in which case she would immediately jump to the bottom line, or what I guess she took (or had been coached to take) as the bottom line.

To the extent that Palin’s debate discourse seemed informed by ideas, they were not ideas that she owns. In the one place during the debate where she had an opportunity to display some compassion, after Senator Biden displayed some emotion in speaking of his knowledge of single parenthood, Palin retreated to her talking points, picking up on the last phrase of Biden’s remarks; but instead of answering Gwen Ifill’s question about her Achilles heel (I guess she has none) or reacting with any authenticity to what had just occurred, she went back to the Maverick theme, which is about as meaningless a piece of junk rhetoric as there is in our present politics.

Here’s the exchange.

This video illustrates the entire Palin action in last evening’s debate, as I saw it: strategic retreat from the opportunity to utter an independent thought or express an honest emotion, mindless repetition of the talking points she had memorized together with shamelessly inauthentic expressions of loyalty to the McCain brand, and constant attack from her perspective as a putative outsider while flashing a cutesy smile and jazzing up her talk with fake enthusiasm, the pretended breathlessnes, the gee whiz, I’m just a poor country girl stuff. There’s about as much real intelligence there as we normally attribute to the fish that gave Palin her high-school nickname.