Sarah Palin put in an unexpected performance last night.

She offered confident responses and defended her own record. It’s too bad her answers had a very tenuous relationship to the truth. She twists and turns her sentences until it’s unclear where she even started. Sarah Palin is scary. She is scary not because she doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to be president, but because she has the intellectual capacity to be a president who hides the truth. We’ve had eight years of that — more than enough.

All politicians obscure the truth; all politicians play politics. What is most disgraceful and most untrue is when you say you are offering straight talk when playing the same political games. Last night Sarah Palin offered nothing but the emptiest of words. Sarah Palin understands her party’s platform just enough to misstate it.

Throughout last night’s debate, Palin oscillated between calling for “strict regulation” and “getting out of the way.” You can’t have it both ways! These positions on regulation are fundamentally opposed. During the debate she agreed with Senator Biden on extending civil rights to same sex couples. This is factually opposed to position of the McCain campaign. She calls John McCain a maverick, but the American people understand that he is no longer an independently-minded politician. She simultaneously agreed with Dick Cheney and called for change. America cannot afford more politicians who purposefully and knowingly mislead us. But that’s what we saw last night.

Long before there was Sarah from Wasilla there was Joe from Scranton. All night long Joe Biden demonstrated the absurdity of the idea that Republicans understand what middle class Americans are going through. He outlined the Obama tax plan to give tax cuts to 95 percent of Americans. He spoke about the Obama health care plan which seeks to provide coverage to all people instead of taxing health care benefits. He spoke to voters across the country about how Senator Obama will end the War in Iraq.

Sarah Palin was right about one thing: There is a clear choice in this election.

Jacob Koch

Timothy Dwight ’09

President, Yale for Obama