I just posted this to Roger Ebert's blog, which currently features an interesting aesthetic evaluation of the VP debate (if you scroll into the comments, Ebert also has an impassioned defense of Ayers-- his responses to comments are in bold). Old news, but why not:


I watched both debates in full and was captivated by them in a way I have never been before. I realized that almost every word that is spoken is in code. Thus it not only makes sense to analyze a debate as a kind of filmic language, it is the -only- way to really comprehend its effects.

It is obvious to anyone that the candidates' speaking points are directed, from point to point, at different groups presumed to be watching. As Tina Fey made light of in her SNL routine, Palin's mention of Israel pandered to a constituency, older Jews, who watch in large numbers and make up a significant force in the Florida electorate. I was struck by just how -different- the groups Palin and Biden were soliciting would seem to be. As in the presidential debate, it seemed to me that both sides were speaking to their bases.

The televisual dimension of the debates, as you rightly point out, told a slightly different story. Anyone can memorize words and parrot them out, but one's nervousness, expressed in visual cues and tics or cadence of speech, is far harder to control. Here I would assume that experience is useful; Biden seemed more measured and confident than Palin. His passionate disagreement of the endlessly repeated "maverick" line did not come off as blustery or a loss of cool; it was a carefully timed shift of energy that was designed to stand out, like figure from ground, from the normal warble of his speech.

It is in this light that his momentary outburst of emotion must be considered. I am not sure whether a conversation over this moment's sincerity even makes sense. It was placed so perfectly within the rest of his performance, was so astonishingly effective, that even if he was absolutely overcome with emotion in that moment, it was still directed instantly, with mastery, into his overall self-construction. Biden merely had to place a PAUSE, a "beat," in the midst of the hurricane of speech that had emanated from both candidates up to that point; in all that had been said, it was silence that had not been taken up until that instant. It was this pregnant silence, this sublime -interruption of feed-, that left Palin utterly cold: a level of political charisma that will always elude her, a truly Clintonian synchronizing of true personal feeling and its simultaneous externalization.

I cannot speak to Biden's inner state at that moment. I can say, however, that his anguish expressed something that was welling inside ME, listening to 90 minutes of Palin excretion-- an immense grief at the spectacle of someone who did not deserve to be there being allowed to grandstand and possibly, horrifically, find her way to the most powerful position in our country at one of its darkest moments.