At NBC it's conventional wisdom without a Convention or wisdom.

Chuck Todd says Biden talked as if "he were the candidate," which is bullshit, and "You're not going to see this debate have much effect --" which would be just, but who can count on justice?

Tom "Swallowed My Tongue Again" Brokaw: "They're whooping it up in Alaska tonight... I wanna say to the Joe Six-Packs out there and the Hockey Moms," which sounds weird coming from him, and much, much weirder when he repeats the "Coldest State, Hottest Governor" bumper-sticker slogan.

All the NBC chatterers agree that Palin was just so darned cute.

Ooh, local angle, the horrible Geraldine Ferraro comments! She says she was "coming at it from two different directions" (Yeah, we bet.) She said Palin did a "good job" and that "they both walked away with a win." But the Divine Sarah "held her own... I wanted my granddaughters to see this debate," blah blah gotta wipe my mouth again. Is Ferraro a smoker? She sounds like Lucille Ball with a bad cold.

Oh, you know who gets the first commercial afterward? Exxon-Mobil. And then an ad for An American Carol.

Oops, here come the conservatives...

There is at first an eerie calm at National Review's The Corner. While editor Kathryn J. Lopez jumps up and down, hugging herself ("If Palin Becomes Veep, Joe Six-Pack would have won. It will be the Joe Six-Pack election"), Mark Levin swoons, "She is the bright light in this campaign from my perspective." Then Lopez flips out with a gigantic post into which she dumps three months worth of talking points, and adds things like "ONE PRO-LIFE ACTIVIST SAYS I’m back where I was a month ago. I wasn’t where Kathleen parker was but I was starting to waiver [sic]..." Yeah, like the Jesus freaks were going to switch to Obama.

Rightblogger fave Instapundit does his usual passive-aggressive link thing, then announces "Frank Luntz's focus group thought it was Palin by a mile. Luntz predicts a big shift in the polls toward McCain over the next few days." Luntz, to the uninitiated, is a right wing factotum who thinks 1984 is a handbook.

Michelle Malkin, with the evenhanded judgment for which she is known, said, "I would like to see all the Sarah doubters and detractors in the Beltway/Manhattan corridor eat their words. Eat them."

The Weekly Standard is enthused that Palin used "shout-out" and "back in the day" during her answers, which it says Ben Smith "compares... to the Gen-X language Obama's been using on the stump for two years." C'mon kids, vote for the anti-abortion candidate!

We'll save the rest for our weekly column. Our overview is that both candidates talked fast and delivered what they were supposed to deliver. Palin met her MDR of kitchie-koo normal-American locutions and proved she could talk about social studies topics, and Biden argued the case for the Democratic ticket. Up to you, and America, which was more important.