U.S. Presidential Election

Biden and Palin debate

Vice-presidential debates are races for also-rans – the American political equivalent of third and fourth place play-offs in the football World Cup finals.

They normally generate interest levels to match.

But Campaign 2008 has been different all along – and the battle of the bottom of the ticket was different too, in this year of firsts.

Democrat Joe Biden and his Republican counterpart, Sarah Palin, are political polar opposites and they inhabit very different cultural galaxies but they do have one thing in common; they are united by a flair for the kind of political slips that can shape the destiny of campaigns in which hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested.

We don't know the exact figures yet but tens of millions of Americans will have watched the full 90 minutes last night.

And one more statistic we'll never know – how many watched in the hope that Mr Biden would strike a couple of bum notes or that Mrs Palin, who has floundered in recent television appearances, would simply implode and take the whole Republican campaign with her.

Many viewers will have stayed on to the end, watching as you watch high-wire artists performing without a net, with a guilty fascination at the possibility that one might fall.

Who won?

In the end, anyone hoping for a moment of train-wreck television would have been disappointed.

Mr Biden and Mrs Palin were both competent, if not exactly sparkling.

The highly restrictive format in which the moderator worked through a list of questions with very little interaction between the candidates and few supplementary challenges pretty much ensured that neither would be able to deliver a knock-out blow.

The unavoidable question on these occasions is simply "Who won?", and on this occasion it is particularly difficult to answer.

I'd be inclined to call it even, while noting that Mrs Palin perhaps exceeded expectations and even got a couple of cheeky digs in towards the end.

Having said that, Mrs Palin gave her supporters some anxious moments – particularly in the early part of the debate where she dealt with at least one question on the economy by ignoring it and offered a distinctly wobbly response on climate change – as though she couldn't quite remember the details of a hastily learned answer.

Most of the time though, it felt we were watching two over-rehearsed performances in parallel, in which both candidates will feel they got their messages across.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7649808.stm