Who won last night's VP debate?

The good news for the McCain camp is that Sarah Palin did not screw up badly. Did she look prepared to be vice president? No. Did she seem to have a grasp of the issues? No. Did she learn her lines well? Yes. However, last night's debate between vice presidential candidates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin was not about winning or losing, it was a referendum on Ms. Palin. Would she repeat the blunders she has made in recent media interviews? Would her lack of experience make her look completely out of her depth?

The bad news for the McCain camp is that Biden didn't screw up either, which he has a penchant of doing in partisan political debates. Although he was certainly Palin's intellectual superior (which she tried to counter with "aw-shucks" folksiness), Biden, at times, looked visibly irritated by the fact that Ms. Palin refused to answer questions and instead stuck to her pre-rehearsed script (After her rambling answer to a question concerning a plan in Iraq, Biden pointed out quite accurately "I never heard a plan there."). But he never patronized, never talked down to her. Instead, he concentrated his attacks on the top of the ticket, John McCain.

Which is more bad news for McCain because Ms. Palin kept sticking to a script that referred to McCain as a "maverick," a claim Biden said quite forcibly late in the debate wasn't supported by McCain's voting record. What the McCain-Palin tickets needs to do, however, is make Obama the message, not McCain's "maverick" status, and they have not been successful doing that. Of course, the current financial crisis hasn't helped. The overriding issue on the minds of most voters has been and undoubtedly will continue to be the economy and Ms. Palin did not elaborate on any ideas her side might have to overcome this crisis or help Americans battle foreclosures or what programs they would cut because of these problems.

In fact, Palin did nothing to allay fears she is not equipped for the office of vice president. Biden was far superior when the questions involved foreign policy and national security. When she was asked about Israel, she talked about “a two-state solution, building our embassy also in Jerusalem, those things that we look forward to being able to accomplish with this peace-seeking nation.” Asked when and if she would use nuclear weapons, she said: “nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people and too many parts of our planet.” What most people will remember when she tried to contradict Biden on military activities in Afghanistan was the fact that she got the American commander's name wrong.

So, in the end, Palin didn't do what many in her party feared: She didn't screw things up for McCain. The problem is she didn't do anything to help the Republicans' chances either. And even if she had, would it have made that much difference? I remember clearly the vice presidential debate between Lloyd Bentsen of Texas and George Bush's running mate Dan Quayle of Indiana. Bentsen won that debate in a rout. Yet it had absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election. Why? Because, when it's all said and done, we vote for the presidential, not the vice presidential, candidates. And with McCain's announcement he is conceding Michigan and with the polls showing him behind in the swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, McCain needs help from somewhere. He has two more debates to try to stop the slide. Last night didn't do it. It didn't accelerate the slide, as many Republicans feared and many Democrats hoped, but it didn't stop it. The only person who can do that is McCain himself.

And that can be problematic. Consider that Ms. Palin argued voters don't want another Washington insider, they want John McCain (who has been a Washington insider as a senator for 26 years). Consider that Ms. Palin said several times she and McCain would demand strict government oversight to eliminate Wall Street greed and followed that by repeatedly saying government must "get out of the way" of American business.

So, yes, Ms. Palin survived. But her performance further illustrated that McCain's choice of her as a running mate was wildly irresponsible and, in words that are not mine, has "shattered the image (McCain) created for himself as the honest, seasoned, experienced man of principle and judgment. It was either an act of incredible cynicism or appallingly bad judgment."