1) I see you fixed “inexperienced” between when I read the post and offered a comment.

2) There is a dimension of the debate that targets committted partisans, and that’s in terms of giving them “talking points” for the water cooler conversations they have with undecideds. As a general rule, Republicans are much, much better at this than Democrats — they distill their messages to simple, easily used soundbites far more effectively. Think of the number of times you heard “Kerry was for it before he was against it” in 2004. The major exception on the Democratic side is Bill Clinton, who does this better, I think, than anyone living US politician.

3) If you want to sound like an insider, tell your friends (preferably with a sad expression), that “in politics, explaining is losing.” It’s another opportunity cost reality: Every minute you spend defending your plan, trying to rebut your opponent’s arguments about your plan, is a minute you don’t spend attacking your opponent and defining them to voters.

Full disclosure to your readers: I’m a reporter who covers the White House.

Despite the repeated references to “media hype” and to wrongheaded (and, as always in these kinds of analyses, unnamed) “pundits,” I don’t see a lot here that differs from the actual media consensus in Washington. It remains the view among the political press here that McCain-Palin need to make the election a referendum on Barack Obama, while Obama-Biden need to make it about George W. Bush but can settle for McCain vs Obama or even just plain McCain.

(Palin might not want to say this, though: “If elected, Barack Obama would be the least inexperienced of any modern president, bar none.” But that’s a copy-editing mistake.)

I’m glad that you are talking about the debate in terms of electoral dynamics. “The media” will be using hand-selected focus groups, snap polls, and other marginally scientific measures for who “won” the debate, but as you point out it’s more complicated than that: There are audiences that are not accounted for in that process. Consider that Palin may be trying to reassure people like syndicated conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, who has called for her to quit the ticket. I doubt, though, that major TV networks will be focusing on that constituency as much as self-identified undecideds.

Since you feel comfortable hitting “the media,” I hope you’ll indulge me as I hit “academics.” Declaring Biden (or, for that matter, Bentsen) irrelevant to the process is wholly wrongheaded. I don’t understand why so many political scientists just cannot seem to grasp the notion of “opportunity cost.”

Take Bentsen-Quayle. Coverage that focuses on “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy” is coverage that does not focus on “Dukakis lacks foreign policy experience.” Coverage that focuses on “Al Gore sighed a lot” is coverage that does not focus on “Governor Bush is misrepresenting his tax plan.”

In short, it’s about the coverage you COULD be getting, not just the coverage you ARE getting. Unless, that is, you think the McCain campaign would not prefer to see “Todd Palin is a champion snowmobiler!” over “Governor Palin is not telling the truth about the ‘Bridge to Nowhere.’”

To put it another way, a vice presidential debate that is not a “game-changer,” as you put it, is every bit as important as one that is a game-changer. If Middlebury is beating Bowdoin 1-0 in hockey (a laughably small margin, I’m sure) then Middlebury is perfectly happy with a total lack of “game-changers.” Saying that a debate that didn’t “change the game” did not have a meaningful impact on a race is wrong.

With the caveat that I’m not endorsing these approaches as fair, or accurate, or anything but tactically interesting:

You’re right that Palin will focus on Obama. My guess is that she will make references to her faith and family throughout (son in Iraq, unspecified “hardships that real Americans go through”), and that we can expect to hear a lot about how Obama tells working families one thing in Scranton and another in San Francisco (anchored on Obama’s comment about how working class Americans “cling to God, guns etc”). I would guess that we’ll hear a bit about how Obama pays his women staffers less than McCain does. I would bet we’ll hear her quote Hillary Clinton (by name) as saying that McCain has a lifetime of experience while Obama has “a speech he gave in 2002″ – as you point out. If Palin doesn’t mention McCain’s military service, look for her to disappear from American politics.

If he’s disciplined, Biden will focus on McCain, particularly on the economy and health care, hammer “McCain = Bush III” and try to reinforce the media narrative that McCain/Palin stretch the truth. But he’ll get drawn into debating Obama when Palin accuses the Democratic of wanting to raise taxes on middle-class families. If Biden feels he’s doing well, he may hazard a shot at Palin on women’s issues — I would guess a reference to how there is only one pro-choice ticket in the race, maybe a line about “women deserve better leadership than a mayor who makes rape victims pay to collect evidence that they were raped.” (Again, I’m taking tactics, not the merits.) Look for Biden to praise some variation on “the old John McCain that I knew” and declare that he’s changed. They will have prepared for this because Biden said in 2004 that he would agree to be McCain’s running mate in a hypothetical future election.

My debate watching advice: Don’t rush to judgment. You’re probably not the target audience unless you’re a suburban married woman or a working class Democrat with doubts about Obama. If you’re a partisan supporter whose opinion is unchanged after the debate, you were not the target audience. Watch the polls in major battleground states over the coming days to see whether the picture there is changing.

Nevertheless your blog is right on. She is running in the other election, not the issues election. I agree she can make progress.

And I am glad you are not her speech writer.

Jack