The Democrats can't afford to underestimate Palin as they did Bush. Not because of the candidate herself is anything special, but because the RNC knows how to frame the debate, and they don't.

What a disappointing debate. Far from the walk-over that many Obama fans were taking for granted, Biden and Palin seemed to demonstrate just how little the Democrats have learned in the past 25 years.

If we look at the debate in strictly intellectual terms, Biden did as well as everyone would expect. He clearly and concisely defended Obama’s positions on the major issues- most impressively in regards to Iraq and the issue of taxation. Palin, to her credit, appeared to have come a hell of a long way since her disastrous CBS interview earlier this week, showing at least an awareness of what McCain’s positions were. Her answers consisted largely of pre-prepared talking points and soundbites, and were a long way from the grounded, systematically explained arguments put forward by Biden. In intellectual terms, the candidate with the superior experience, background knowledge and education won unequivocally.

But both Al Gore and Kerry were beaten by Bush. And as Biden stood there, reeling off lists of arguments, statistics and policy positions- even going so far as to number them for us on several occasions- Palin stood there smirking, just as Bush did in ‘00 and ‘04, and as Reagan had done 15 years before that.

Despite what the political junkies who have the benefit of background knowledge might think, all those facts, arguments and policy positions just bounced right off her. You could see Biden getting more and more exasperated, desperately searching for a knock-out statistic that might elicit a gasp from the audience or an ‘oooh’ and an ‘ahh’ and send Palin dashing out of the room in tears. And poor guy- he just kept repeating himself; wondering why that killer fact didn’t have the desired impact first time round and saying it again, just in case nobody had heard him clearly.

And know-nothing Sarah, who had been drilled to parrot slogans, stood there smirking. When it got to her turn, she barely talked about the issues, and she certainly didn’t waste time explaining her ticket’s reasoning for holding those positions. Instead, she told us stories.

At every opportunity, she told us little details about herself which made her look human, like a normal person rather than a politician. Sure, both candidates engaged in the ‘When I was in Smallville I met superman and he can’t afford to fill his gas tank/ pay for an operation’ rhetoric, but Palin perfected the art of Bush and Reagan, and took it 10 miles further. “Is it all right if I call you Joe?”, she asked loudly as the candidates appeared on stage.

She constantly hammered home the idea of her and McCain being Washington outsiders, on several occasions completely ignoring Biden, the audience and the moderator, and, the down-home outsider she is, talking directly at the camera, and thus to the American people. For those that understand the seriousness of the debate, it’s easy to scoff at these kind of stunts- after all, they’re pre-planned hogwash, about as far from being spontaneous as it comes. But for a nation which prides itself on defying formalities and talking straight, and which is fed-up with Washington convention, they were stunts that resonated.

When Reagan won his first election, the polls indicated that something funny was going on. The majority of people actually disagreed with his stance on many issues, but intended to vote for him anyway.

They voted for him because, while the Democrats gave them lists of facts, Reagan (a man who, it must be said had little more time in Washington than Obama) sold them a dream- a world-view – a set of ideas. He spoke about a country restored from the ignominy of Watergate and global recession, in which the American spirit of free enterprise and self-reliance would be restored, evoking the spirit of the frontier.

Whilst bare logic said that they didn’t necessarily sign up for Reagan’s platform on the immediate issues- his ability to connect with voters, to communicate a more abstract set of values and a character the voters trusted and could relate to meant that, while they didn’t agree with him on everything, they nonetheless had confidence in his ability to handle the unforeseen.

People like (and vote) for people who are like them- even if they don’t always agree with them. The empirical, rationalist model which says that people will naturally vote along the lines of their own self-interest has been proven to be wrong, time and time again. The human brain is more sophisticated than a mechanical instrument of narrow, self-interested logic, and is designed to make decisions based on more than the facts before us. People will ignore facts that don’t fit into the frame they have chosen to view the World through.

Earlier this year, the Obama campaign, almost uniquely for a Democratic candidate in a long time, showed signs of understanding this. He beat Hillary, not because they differed substantially on the issues, but because voters bought into a story- a wider narrative of a little skinny kid who, from the most unlikely of backgrounds, had forged himself an identity in America, the nation of opportunity, and who would once again restore that opportunity to the nation as a whole. Presidential elections are about selling characters, not issue positions. If the electorate believes in the character, they’ll trust them to handle the issues.

The Obama campaign- as the Bush and Reagan campaigns did too, ran on the reasoning that if voters responded and bought into the ‘Obama dream’, and the values and principles implicit within it, then agreement on the facts and policy positions would follow. Palin, and John McCain, by presenting a story of a pair of mavericks taking on the World, are doing the same thing. The two most successful Democrats of the 20th century- FDR and JFK, did it too- not by setting out specific plans for economic renewal or for winning the cold war, but by embodying the concepts of renewed confidence, youth and vitality, thus winning the confidence of the American people to handle the challenges facing the nation.

Over the past few months though (I suspect due to the increase in the DNC’s influence since he became the official nominee), the Obama campaign seems to have lost its nerve. They came under attack for not talking about the issues enough, and while it was definitely time to have some plans prepared in more detail that could be referred to in rebutting some of McCain’s more outrageous claims, they’ve done this at the expense of abandoning the key ideas and narrative that won Obama the primary.

Which is the reason why Palin could stand there and smirk, ignoring the issues whilst hammering home her personality, life story and what she (at least pretends) to represent. And Biden was doing half the work for her- did anybody count the number of times he said the word maverick? As George Lakoff predicted an in an excellent article at the beginning of this month, the more the Obama campaign uses the word ‘maverick’- even if in order to negate McCain-Palin’s claims to be one, the more they unwittingly re-enforce the concept.

Nixon standing before TV cameras to say ‘I am not a crook’, simply made us all think of him as a crook. Same principle. Yet Biden stood there and repeatedly said that ‘McCain is not a maverick’, and we all sat there and thought of McCain as a maverick. Use any other phrase- call him a ‘Washington insider’ as Lakoff suggested, a ‘friend of lobbyists’, ‘yesterday’s man’ or any other phrase you like- but got goodness sake, Biden should know better than to fall into line and obediently parrot McCain’s own choice of (largely positive) language to describe himself.