Jon Cummings: My junior year at college I took a creative writing class in which all the students received copies of each other’s short stories and offered critiques in a roundtable format. Almost all the students were earnest, ambitious types practicing to write the Great American Novel, and most of the mistakes we made were problems of overreach – of attempting to go from zero to William Faulkner in 8 seconds. One young man, however, submitted a sweet little story that seemed to be written for – and by – an eighth grader. Its plot was simplistic, its characters were cute but vapid, its message was utterly immature – yet the whole thing was rendered successfully, as far as it went. My classmates and I sat around the table and had no idea what to say to this guy; we didn’t know for sure whether he’d really tried to write a children’s story, or whether this effort represented the full firing of his intellectual circuitry. So we gingerly danced around our critiques, piling on the patronizing praise for what he was “able to accomplish” with the “type of story he wrote.” And then, after we’d made the author feel like a winner, we dug into the next story with the kind of analytical intensity each of us would want applied to our own work.

That story pretty much sums up my feelings about tonight’s festivities. It’s a 200-word substitute for “Joe Biden was playing chess, and Sarah Palin was playing Candyland.” She announced at the outset that she wouldn’t really be participating in a debate – “I may not answer the questions the way you want me to, or the way the moderator does …” – and she proceeded to instead offer up a manic, 90-minute imitation of Dolly Parton hosting Hee-Haw, replete with winks and nose-scrunches and “darns” and “you betchas” and rambling soliloquies so full of shit the highlights in her hair faded to brown.

Neither Gwen Ifill nor Biden chose at any point to remind Palin that there were actual questions she was supposed to be answering, actual policies she was meant to be discussing. Palin’s answers were brain dumps interspersed with folksy witticisms aimed directly at the type of folks who are predisposed to want a know-nothing hockey mom rather than a dedicated public servant living in the Naval Observatory. Ifill and Biden didn’t seem to know what to make of this adorable bumpkin, so they carried on as though they were still taking part in something serious and Palin was merely the comic relief. (more…)