She didn't win because she was smarter or more persuasive or more articulate. She wasn't. At times she was utterly incoherent, as when she answered a question about bankruptcy regulation with a jarring non sequitir about her experience on energy policy. Huh?
And more than once she seemed to settle back on material that she seemed to have memorized--"mayor, business owner, oil and gas regulator." My brother used a football analogy. "At times, it seemed Palin was like a rookie running back with lots of potential who is trying to remember the plays but who has a few nice runs because of the natural instinct, but then gets caught up over-thinking."
But these are quibbles. She won because to a vast majority of those who watched the debate tonight she likely came off as a plausible vice president. And that was all that mattered.
In my view, she did more than just survive. In between her flashes of confusion, Palin surfaced issues that put Joe Biden on the defensive or, at the very least, made him uncomfortable. And she had several moments where she scored clean hits on Biden and Barack Obama: on clean coal, on the patriotism of raising taxes, on Obama saying one thing to one group of voters and something different to another, on Biden criticizing Obama for his vote on troop funding in Iraq, when she reminded Biden that he himself said that he'd be privileged to run on a ticket with John McCain. When Biden complained that Republicans have taken to repeating the "drill, drill, drill" mantra, she owned it and gently corrected him. "I think the chant is drill, baby, drill." It was a clever turn, and judging from virtually every poll on the issue, it was politically very smart.