A couple of e-mails prompted by Rhonda Sherman’s interoffice memo.

From Slate’s Fred Kaplan:

From a screenwriter friend, Paul Bochner:

Attention Steely Dan fans: Donald Fagen goes all political on us.

Worth a look: Using nothing but lungpower and brainpower, Barney Frank turns the O’Reilly Factor into the Frank Factor.

Well, if what we want is a perky President (actuarial probabilities being what they are), the choice is clear: go whalin’ with Palin! No doubt about it, she’s as cute as a Goldwater button. And if by some chance she doesn’t put McCain over the top, her next career move is obvious: co-hosting the perennially last-place CBS morning program. She could ace the cooking and celebrity segments, and by the time this campaign is over she’ll even know enough about legislation and foreign policy and stuff like that to banter with Jeff Greenfield and handle serious interviews with people like Richard Holbrooke and Michael Beschloss. “The Early Show,” with Harry Smith and Sarah Palin.

Did she “win” last night? In a way. She stanched the bleeding. If her activities for the next month can be limited to charming the “base” at rallies, chatting with right-wing talk-radio and Fox News hosts, and granting interviews to dim, carefully vetted “Eyewitness News” local anchors, she probably will do no further damage to the Republican ticket. Given the disasters of the last couple of weeks, that counts as victory. Maybe not Trafalgar-type victory, but Iraq-type. The surge has succeeded.

The choppy format, which discouraged follow-ups, saved her, along with Gwen Ifill’s tendency to ask questions (Does the financial crisis show the best of Washington or the worst of Washington? What’s scarier, a nuclear Iran or an unstable Afghanistan?) that could be answered with the word “both.” Beyond the “Animal Farm” certainties—taxes bad, victory good—and the hockey-mom patter, Palin had nothing to say, but she said it without too much of the usual syntactical chaos. The talking points and the buzzwords (maverick, the people’s side) got her through.

Most of the commentators, again, seemed to get it wrong, mainly because they were grading on a curve. Palin did “better than expected.” On the other hand, she had been expected to do so poorly that she could hardly fail to do better than expected, i.e., she was expected to do better than expected, which means that she did about as well as expected. But according to the insta-polls, the electorate, as opposed to what I once called the expectorate, seems to have concluded fairly clearly that Biden “won,” possibly because what the electorate was expecting was a debate between two candidates for Vice-President, not the raw materials for some arcane calculation of who exceeded whose expectations. Biden succeeded in making a case for the Obama-Biden ticket. Palin succeeded mainly in making a case that she, Palin, is a person of near-normal intelligence and great superior adorability.

Last Saturday night, in Nyack, New York, the Hudson River village where I spent a lot of my kidhood, an ad hoc group of local people in the arts put on a show: a benefit for Barack Obama. Not to gush or anything, but it was wonderful. And, while all the talent was local, the evening held its own on the high-end boldface-name meter.

We arrived at the theatre—a 1960s movie house that has been turned into an arts center called Riverspace—a little late. Too late, alas, to hear David Shire, the Oscar-winning film and stage composer, sing a couple of his own songs.

But not too late to see the ten-foot-high face of Bill Irwin up on the big video screen, over a caption reading VIA SATELLITE, having an electronic conversation with Elliott Forrest, one of Riverspace’s artistic directors, who was actually in the room. Irwin, as you probably know, is the world’s greatest scholar-practitioner of baggy-pants clowning (as well as a Tony-winning actor and Sesame Street’s Mr. Noodle). He showed some clips of his silent-film idols—Chaplin, Keaton, and others more obscure—and handed a rubber check off the side of the screen, where Forrest took it, held it up, and stretched it. Magic!

Next up was Jonathan Demme, director of fine films ranging from “Citizens Band” through “Silence of the Lambs” through this week’s “Rachel Getting Married.” Like Irwin, he was not physically present, but via video he introduced and showed clips of affecting interviews with Hurricane Katrina victims from a documentary-in-progress.

After an intermission, Bill T. Jones, the Tony-winning choreographer and co-founder of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, danced solo, on a bare, spotlit stage, to the music of an Al Green version of “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” I’d never seen Jones dance before and was quite unprepared for the passion, beauty, and stately, sinuous liquidity of his performance. Jones’s works are often politically pointed, and toward the end of this one he paused at the microphone and spoke very briefly, asking, essentially, Dare we hope again? Dare we put our faith in a man again? But it was the dance, with its lovely mixture of mournfulness and quicksilver joy, that fully posed and answered those questions.

Finally, Toni Morrison, our neighborhood Nobel Laureate, whose upright stature, African-tinged clothes (robes, really), and magnificent head of crownlike gray dreadlocks make her presence more regal than any real-life queen’s, paid tribute to Obama—one real writer acknowledging another—and then, in her thrillingly rich, deep voice, read aloud from “Dreams From My Father.”

Quite an evening.

I’ve noticed throughout this campaign, by the way, that there are two kinds of Obama supporters: those who have read “Dreams From My Father” and those who haven’t. The ones who have read it tend to be impatient with certain of the stock observations made by nonreaders of all political persuasions—comments like “We don’t know all that much about him” or “I’m not sure who he is, really.” Who he is is right there on the page. Or on the CD: I’ve also noticed that those who have absorbed “Dreams” via the audiobook version, read by the author (who reproduces his characters’ accents), are the most fervent of all. But a read-by-Morrison edition would be almost as good.

If you have a copy handy, the passages Morrison read were drawn from Chapter 19, “Kenya,” toward the end of the book. If, as many of us hope, Barack Obama is elected President next month, “Dreams From My Father” will become part of the American literary canon. And once he has served his two terms and written his memoirs, a Library of America edition of his works will surely be forthcoming.

(A final note. Bill Irwin’s appearance, I later learned, wasn’t really via satellite. It was plain old videotape, with the interactions with Elliott Forrest carefully rehearsed. Coulda fooled me. Did fool me.)

From Rhonda Sherman, impresaria of the New Yorker Festival:

He went with the winger, too. But I guess the looks didn’t hurt.

When the commentators came on after Friday night’s Ole Miss debate, I have to say I was puzzled. They were all saying that it was a draw, or that McCain had won “on points,” or that McCain had dominated the first part, about the financial crises, and maybe Obama the last part, about Iraq and foreign policy.

I hadn’t seen it that way. I was nervous as hell beforehand, of course, but by ten minutes into it I had relaxed and was enjoying the show. I turned to my wife and said, “Am I missing something, or is this incredibly one-sided? One-sided for Obama, I mean?”

That’s how I felt all the way through. It seemed pretty obvious to me. One guy was focused, well-organized, calmly energetic, and, while treating his opponent with collegial good manners, firm and occasionally stern; the other guy was churlish, repeated himself, rambled, made feeble jokes we’d heard a thousand times before (“I’m not Miss Congeniality”), and committed minor gaffes, such as (twice) calling the financial crisis a fiscal crisis.

So why were the talking heads saying what they were saying? I have three theories.

1. The talking heads didn’t give the debate their full attention. They were reading their BlackBerrys, trading quips with each other on the set or in the greenroom, making notes, and eyeing their colleagues to gauge their reactions. As a result, they missed the emotional thread.

2. The talking heads did notice that Obama was “winning,” but were reluctant to say so in case “the American people,” as represented by focus groups and quickie polls, turned out to disagree. Also, they were worried about being called “in the tank.”

3. Since the talking heads are the ultimate high-information voters, they kept noticing “opportunities” for “knockout blows” that Obama was missing. Instead of judging Obama against McCain, they were judging the actually existing Obama against a sort of Obama Muppet, with they themselves, the talking heads, doing the ventriloquizing.

I was relieved, but also a little surprised, when the focus groups and insta-polls seemed to indicate a fairly clear Obama “victory.” I shouldn’t have been so surprised, given that the nonverbal valences—the way the two men comported themselves, the way they looked and sounded—were so obviously in his favor. But after seeing McCain’s numbers spike in the wake of the Palin peak, I had begun to mistrust the wisdom of the crowd. Also, I assumed that some of the points that I saw as counting for Obama would either go over the heads of the uninformed or be counted for McCain. McCain’s confusing “fiscal” with “financial,” for example—that was pretty appalling if you happen to know which is which, but if you don’t? Or when McCain disdainfully accused Obama of not knowing the difference between strategy and tactics—it was actually McCain who had gotten that one wrong, but if you happened to be ignorant of the difference yourself you might have thought, “A palpable hit!”

The commentariat was nearly unanimous in judging that McCain had “scored” on the “earmarks issue,” but who knows? Maybe some unknown portion of the public understands that $18 billion or $24 billion worth of earmarks is chicken feed in a trillion-dollar budget and therefore wondered why McCain kept obsessing about it. The commentariat also liked McCain’s aggressiveness, but the voters, or those designated by pollsters to stand in for them, did not seem to agree. A quick CNN poll of debate-watchers showed Obama beating McCain in eleven categories, from Iraq to likeability, while McCain prevailed in just two: terrorism and “spent more time attacking his opponent.”

The McCain people were evidently channeling the commentators. While the debate was still going on, they posted a spot, made from clips from the still-in-progress confrontation, showing Obama saying three times that McCain was “right” or “absolutely right” about something or other, followed by the usual sneering voice saying, “Is Barack Obama ready to lead? No.” By the end of the debate, Obama had said seven times that McCain was right. In other words, while McCain talked about his ability to “reach across the aisle,” Obama actually did it. But he gave up nothing substantive. Each time Obama credited his opponent with being right, it was always about something anodyne, and it was always followed by a strong expression of disagreement. Obama’s purpose, besides appearing gracious, polite, respectful, and open-minded, was to slice off from whatever McCain had said the part that he (and the audience, presumably) had no problem with, the better to isolate and obliterate the part he did have a problem with. (Incidentally, as Ezra Klein notes, how could McCain have “approved this message” if the message was sent while McCain was still fully occupied on the stage at Ole Miss?)

Partly thanks to Chris Matthews, who, post-debate, kept asking everyone he interviewed why McCain had refused to look Obama in the eye, McCain’s churlishness became a story. I didn’t particularly notice it at the time, but then I didn’t take much notice of Gore’s sighs in ‘00 or Bush Senior’s glancing at his wristwatch in ‘92, either. Still, it’s gratifying that what goes around comes around.

Neither of them has it exactly right, but Jon comes a lot closer than Leon. A full account of what McCain actually said, and in what context, is available. Readers may judge for themselves.

The second installment of Katie Couric’s interview with Sarah Palin aired last night. The topic was the great wide world. One exchange deserves special study. From the transcript provided by CBS:

This seems to be a case of incoherence of thought leading to incoherence of syntax. Pronouns wander in search of antecedents like Arctic explorers in a blinding snowstorm. Homophones confuse the transcriber. For example, one of the Governor’s answers could as sensibly, or insensibly, be rendered as

In the “Putin rears his head” answer, jagged shards of the hasty briefings lately stuffed into Palin’s pretty head clang tinnily against one another. “We send those”—those? those what?—”out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this powerful nation, Russia.” Those what? We send what? My hunch is that this alarming jumble must have something to do with the path that Russian intercontinental missiles would take on their way to the lower Forty-eight and/or the air-defense installations that NORAD maintains in the state Palin is executive of. But who knows? The whole thing reads like something rendered from the Finnish by Google Translate.

For a seventy-two-year-old cancer survivor to have placed this person directly behind himself in line for the Presidency was an act of almost incomprehensible cynicism and irresponsibility. It makes a cruel—what’s the word?—mockery of his slogan. “Country First” indeed.

P.S. In the Seattle Times, Hal Bernton reports that Governor Palin has “balked” at opportunities to visit Russia on any of those “trade missions” she boasted of. Bernton writes:

On the other hand, she has met Henry Kissinger and the president of Afghanistan.

What a contrast yesterday. First, out comes McCain, looking drawn, jittery, and (to my admittedly jaundiced eye) guilty, with his announcement that he doesn’t want to debate on Friday because the financial crisis is too awful for a thing like politics to occur. He reads his statement and exits quickly. A couple of hours later, Obama appears. He looks and sounds like a President of the United States. He is preternaturally calm. He explains the chronology of the day: he called McCain at 8:30, the call was returned at 2:30, they discussed the idea of putting out a joint statement about the crisis. He says not a word about postponing the debate.

Then, unlike McCain, Obama takes questions. It becomes a full-fledged press conference. He eventually mentions the postponement. He says that during their phone call McCain had said it was something that ought to be looked at, and he had replied that they should get their joint statement out first. He makes it clear, in an offhand way, that McCain had blindsided him, but he does it without rancor. Perhaps there was a miscommunication, he suggests generously. He stresses his agreement with McCain that the crisis is neither Republican nor Democratic but American. He outlines some conditions he would like to see attached to the bailout bill but adds that both parties should refrain from loading it up with extraneous desiderata. He mentions a couple of specific examples of Democratic pet causes, including bankruptcy protection, that he doesn’t think should be in the bill. His manner with respect to the crisis is grave and businesslike, but he treats McCain’s debate-postponement demand as a minor matter that need not be taken too seriously. He notes dryly that both candidates have big airplanes with their names emblazoned and can easily travel to Oxford, Mississippi. He suggests that a potential President ought to be able to cope with more than one problem at a time.

Obama handled the situation perfectly. He didn’t have to point out that McCain’s cheap gambit was a cheap gambit. Surrogates, supporters, and, perhaps, the press would do that for him. And by treating the debate-postponement ploy as a detail, he slipped the trap McCain had set for him: either be bullied into obeying McCain’s order or be seen as putting politics above country. That’s how I saw it, anyhow. I have no idea if “the American people” will agree. Dick Morris doesn’t think so. On Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News, Morris was bubbling over with glee at the brilliance of it all. McCain’s maneuver, Morris said, was so clever it might have been orchestrated by Karl Rove himself. Maybe Morris is right. At the very least, McCain managed to prevent the cable chatterers from focusing on the news that his campaign manager had been on the Fannie Mae take right up to the moment last month when Fannie fell on her fanny.

A couple of hours later, Katie Couric, whose evening news program on CBS is reliably reported to have become the best of the big three, shows a few minutes of the interview she had taped that morning with Sarah Palin. Couric is both pleasanter and tougher than Charlie Gibson had been during the only other non-Fox interview the lady has condescended to give. For Palin, the interview excerpt begins badly. Couric asks about the campaign manager and the Fannie Mae payroll. Palin gives her answer, something about how her “understanding” is that the campaign manager had “recused himself.” Couric rephrases the question. Palin gives her answer again. It is nearly word for word the same as the first time. Chilling. The interview excerpt ends badly, too. Couric asks what, besides suggesting two years ago that there ought to be more oversight of the mortgage giants, McCain has ever done in his twenty-six years in Congress to change the way Wall Street does business. Palin points to McCain’s call for more oversight of the mortgage giants. Couric asks again. Palin says fondly that McCain is a maverick. Politely, a third time, Couric asks for specific examples. Pertly, Palin says, “I’ll try to find some and I’ll bring ‘em to ya.”

In other news, President Bush gave a nationally televised speech.