I thought there was a very telling moment during Thursday night’s VEEP debate when Gwen Ifill asked Senator Biden and Govenor Palin to respond to the conventional wisdom that he lacked discipline and that she lacked experience. While Senator Biden gave a straightforward, down-to-earth answer, Governor Palin almost made it sound like raising her family was her Achilles heel. Was she indirectly blaming her family for a lack of experience here? That struck me as a Freudian gaffe. This is part of what she said that caught my attention:

“But it wasn't just that experience tapped into, it was my connection to the heartland of America. Being a mom, one very concerned about a son in the war, about a special needs child, about kids heading off to college, how are we going to pay those tuition bills? About times and Todd and our marriage in our past where we didn't have health insurance and we know what other Americans are going through as they sit around the kitchen table and try to figure out how are they going to pay out-of-pocket for health care? We've been there also so that connection was important.” – CNN transcript

Only a genuine lack of character associated with a lack of experience would have lead Sarah Palin to produce such a conflicted, naïve answer to Ifill’s useful question. In the context of Ifill’s question, what Palin had stated almost made it sound like she was belittling the lives of average Americans.

All this debate showed was that Sarah Palin might have rehearsed a bunch of scripted sound bites for answers. Where Senator Biden’s answers sounded natural, coherent, and relevant, Governor Palin’s often lacked these qualities which reflect authenticity.

In this debate, I thought Palin failed to repudiate abysmal performances in her few interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, which revealed the unplugged, unrehearsed Sarah Palin as more of an air-headed country bumpkin, unprepared and unfit for the busy world of Washington and global politics. Only six years ago, Palin was presiding over town council meetings in a small town. Her lack of political experience has stuck out like a sore thumb in all of her TV interviews and in her one and only debate before Election Day. Sarah Palin may turn out to be the Achilles heel for Candidate McCain. How is it the maverick reformer from Arizona selected the one politician on the map that epitomized the very problem that he stakes his reputation on as a reformer? The truth is stranger than fiction.

My impression was, Palin simply doesn't know what "Achilles heel" means. Big surprise.

When she "answered" the question by listing her good qualities, Biden (very cleverly, I thought) briefly addressed the question (to show he had understood it), then segued into a list of his own positive attributes (so as not to look totally odd to people who, like Palin, hadn't understood the question).