U.S. didn't hate Palin's performance; Utah loved her

WASHINGTON — From the barking heads to the boisterous bloggers, from the Beltway elite to the heartland newspapers, a grand consensus quickly emerged about Sarah Palin's debate performance: She wasn't awful.

In fact, the opinion-mongers said, she was poised, charming and sooo much better than she had been in her interviews with Katie Couric that there almost seemed to be a collective sigh of disappointment at the absence of a train wreck. Couric set the tone on CBS by declaring seconds after the veep debate ended Thursday night that the Republican governor of Alaska "did not embarrass herself" against Sen. Joe Biden.

Why, then, did two quickie polls by two national news networks say Biden had won handily?

A CBS News/Knowledge Networks Poll found that 46 percent of uncommitted voters who watched the debate thought Biden won, with 21 percent siding with Palin. A CNN poll found respondents judging Biden the winner by a margin of 51 percent to 36 percent but calling Palin more likable by 54 percent to Biden's 36 percent.

In GOP-heavy Utah, however, the majority who responded to a Dan Jones & Associates poll said Palin was the clear winner of the night.

The poll, conducted Thursday and Friday for the Deseret News and KSL-TV, had a margin of error of 6.2 percent for the entire sample and 7 percent for debate watchers.

Of the 260 people polled, 203 watched the debate. Of those who watched the debate, 49 percent said Palin was definitely or probably the winner, whereas 28 percent felt that Biden probably or definitely won.

Twenty-three percent felt that neither candidate won or didn't know.

"I don't think the debate itself, in terms of Utah, will have any impact on the presidential election," said Dianne Meppen, project director over the survey.

The debate had little impact on the way voters who watched would vote in November, according to the survey. Some 92 percent of those who watched said that the debate did not change the way they intended to vote. Two percent said they were now more likely to vote for Republican Sen. John McCain and 3 percent said they were more likely to vote for Democrat Sen. Barack Obama.

Commenting on the debate, analyst Charlie Cook, a former high school debater, said "Biden is clearly so much more knowledgeable, by a factor of about a million ... But the expectations were that Biden would mop her up. The expectations for Palin were so low that she knocked it out of the ballpark. She was getting downright sassy."

How is it that one candidate gets to be judged by an artificial benchmark created by the very media "filter" that Palin criticized in the debate? That, says Time correspondent Karen Tumulty, explains the gap between the pundits and the people.

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