I settled into the corner as the noise lowered and the debate started.

Palin launched into her charm offensive  winking, smiling, dodging questions and speaking in her signature Sarah-phonics , a mash up of sentence fragments and colloquialisms glued together with misplaced also’s and there’s  gibberish really. Everyone in the bar lapped it up. It was The Sarah Palin Show.

As it became clear that she wasn’t going to implode, I started to see the debate instead as The Joe Biden Show. And, it was good.

Through the booing and hissing, I saw a strong, authoritative, confident and sensitive candidate emerge. On the whole, he came across as intelligent and relatable; a real person. That’s a quality that often eludes Barack Obama.

Biden’s job in many ways was to reintroduce himself to Americans. Palin had stolen the spotlight, and he was campaigning in the shadows. The media was ignoring him. Voters didn’t know him. In a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, 32 percent of Democrats, 38 percent of independents and 41 percent of Republicans said they didn’t know or had no answer when asked to say what they most liked about Biden.