Minutes after the vice presidential debate ended Thursday night, Loose Cannon provided readers of this blog his impressions of the evening. Those impressions were mostly positive, due mainly to the civility and appealing personages—at least that evening—of both Sarah Palin and Joe Biden. I might have gotten back to it on Friday, but I posted instead on the House passage of the Bush administration's $800 billion-plus Wall Street bailout bill. Yet, I can’t get the Veep’s debate out of my mind. The Nielsen ratings came in yesterday, and guess what? They shattered all previous records for vice presidential debates. Some 70 million Americans tuned in to the St. Louis face-off
It’s a cliché, and a truism, to say that Americans don’t vote for the vice presidential candidates; they vote for the people running for president. Maybe that rule is still intact. But 70 million viewers! Those are Super Bowl numbers. And so it dawned on me this morning, even though it’s a lovely autumn Saturday here in Northern Virginia—a nice day for yard work and touch football, not for being cooped up indoors over one’s laptop—that I’d better figure out what was really said to those 70 million people. What I mean is, I'd like to know how much of it was true.
So, here’s my proposition: I’m going to go through the transcript of the Biden-Palin debate this afternoon and this evening, and I will fact-check it to the best of my ability. Some news organizations, including The Washington Post, have done a bit of this already; so has an excellent non-partisan academic outfit at the University of Pennsylvania called www.factcheck.org. I’ll piggy-back on their work, and do more of my own, and post the results tomorrow.
I realize that such efforts have a waft of futility about them—70 million is a tad more than read, well, even this popular and most excellent of political web logs. But we must all do our part. So, until tomorrow, aidios.