October 3, 2008

Watching the vice-presidential debate last night I was pleasantly surprised at how consistently impressive, forceful, sharp, and presidential Joe Biden came across. While all eyes were on Sarah Palin, it was Biden who stole the show.

Yet even though the race is racing to a close, there's still enough time for Palin to bounce back and to hoodwink viewers. That's because she knows how to play to the damned camera, despite her rhetorical gaffes, her enormous Ditz Quotient, and her Rocket S. Squirrel perkiness. The lens loves her. And that's always dangerous.

As Libby Copeland observed earlier this week in The Washington Post:

"It starts with the way Palin's delivery allows her to leap through the camera into your living room. Perhaps in part because of her background as a television reporter and beauty pageant competitor, she seems to understand how the camera works.

" 'What she knows is that the camera is a thief,' says Republican strategist Ron Bonjean, who has worked for former House speaker Dennis Hastert and former Senate majority leader Trent Lott, among others. 'The camera will steal your emotions and make you flat, and what she's doing is over-emphasizing her emotions, over-emphasizing her delivery, in order to get that realness across to the camera.'

"The realness is what her fans talk about -- that she's like them, that she doesn't seem contrived. 'We feel like she talks like we do,' says Susan Geary, a Richmond retiree who attended a McCain-Palin rally in Fairfax last month. 'Like she's sitting in your kitchen.'

"There's a consistency to Palin's appeal -- if you go back and look at old clips of her, you see many of the same stylistic elements -- the warmth and the eager delivery, the voice that drops and rises emphatically, the dropped g's.

"'That's been her bread and butter for 20 years, from the day she sat down in front of the TV cameras to do her sportscasting,' says Anchorage-based pollster Ivan Moore. 'Her success in her political career has been based on being able to project this enormously friendly, enormously appealing physical presence -- and, some people would argue, use it to conceal this very much more ruthless and nakedly political character.'"