Confused in California

The red, white, and blue bumper sticker on my car this fall is neither for McCain nor for Obama.

"Mark Twain for President," it says, along with a cynical quote from him: "It's better to be popular than right."

That stance turned out to be one thing Joe Biden and Sarah Palin agreed on last night in their televised debate.

I sat down to watch it fiercely, pen and notepad in hand, as I had done with last week's debate between John McCain and Barak Obama.

But this time, attentive as I was, I kept getting confused.

I'd listen to Gwen Ifill's question, ready to compare the candidates' answers, but start to feel confused, then realize that Palin (often) and Biden (occasionally) had deliberately sidestepped the question and turned to some other point.

The other confusing factor was the two candidates saying "These are the facts" while referring to "facts" that were diametrically opposed. Biden called on facts repeatedly, while Palin said of one of his answers, "That's not straight talk. You supported the war then; now you're against it."

* McCain voted with Obama on some ballot, clamed Biden, but Palin claimed they voted differently.

* Obama voted against money for "our troops in Iraq" said Palin, but Biden argued that McCain voted against funding too when the bill contained a specific date for withdrawing troops. I started to feel that I couldn't trust the facts of either of them.

* Both Palin and Biden accused the other side of planning to raise taxes for the average person and of favoring deregulation of Wall Street. On those issues, I felt pretty sure of which debater was stretching way beyond the truth.

The problem was that these debaters were not trying to clarify; they just wanted to look good and get the advantage in the debate.

As Mark Twain would say, they each wanted to be popular. Facts were as malleable as silly putty in their hands.

Thank God for fact checkers getting to work afterward--the average listener would have no way of untangling that mess of counter claims.

Another factor in my confusion was those two little lines--one green and one orange--going up and down at the bottom of the CNN screen to record the moment-by-moment favorability ratings of a group of Ohio undecided voters, half male, half female.

I was distracted from monitoring my own reaction because of this constant information about how these other voters were feeling.

After a while even the moving Tinkerbell-like drop of light tracing the letters CNN at the bottom left of the screen became a distraction.

The final factor in my confusion was fear. I hung on each word of Sarah Palin, afraid that she would say something so extremely ignorant that I would blush for all womankind.

About halfway through the debate I realized, "Thank God, she's doing okay!" Then I relaxed a bit and my mind cleared a little.

I had to smile at Palin's "barometer of change" that also "trumpets," making barometers something like trombones.

Her words about the environment being (or was it not being?) "the be-all and end-all of our planet" had a kind of Art-Linkletter-Kids-Say-the-Darndest-Things quality.

There was also her great line about "raping the intercontinental shelf." Geology 101: continents have shelves around the edges but don't extend them out to each other.

And what did Biden mean by saying (I think) "McCain is opposed to extending the arms control regime in the world"? Huh?

At least he knew what an Achilles heel was. I got confused when Palin answered that one by talking about her strengths.

Her colloquialisms--"work with yuh...gettin' ...goin' ...gotcha"--didn't sound that genuine to me. Would anyone speak that way on a stage without a deliberate choice to stay folksy? If she becomes VP, we have four more years of George W.'s affected tone--ranch hand at the helm of the country.

Overall, I felt relief at the end of this debate. The effort to make sense of nonsense was over, and the female candidate didn't fall on her face.

At least I had a stake in the debate. At least all four candidates are not men.