I'm eagerly looking forward to the debate on Thursday, and evidently, so is everyone else. Roger Simon at Politico wrote an interesting article on how Biden is prepping for the debate.

Biden's strategy is twofold: Don't look condescending and study-up.

1) Don't look condescending - No one wants to see Biden sighing and looking like the smart kid in class who knows all the answers (think Al Gore). Sarah Palin's gaffes will be picked apart by the the mainstream media and bloggers, regardless of Biden's reactions to them. Everything she says will be carefully fact-checked, analyzed, and blogged about anyway, so Biden shouldn't lose any fans by looking bored or even amused. If Biden can keep his conduct befitting of a president, and he can keep the first-names and colloquialisms to a minimum (think Sarah Palin referring to Charles Gibson as "Charlie" every time she answered a question), he'll come out looking like the better candidate.

2) Study, study, study - Biden has been prepping for this debate for a long while, presumably since before Palin was announced as McCain's running mate. Plus, Biden has been a senator since age 1973, when he was 30 years old (the minimum age for a senator), so, as we've discussed in class, he hasn't been front-loading political knowledge for the last month - he's been acquiring it for 35 years. Biden's political experience aside, he already knows Sarah Palin's record. He knows that she's a suspect choice for a vice president and she has already shown that she doesn't have the depth and breadth of knowledge necessary to hold her own in an interview, let alone a debate.

Biden is, by far, the least talked about of the four major players in this race. There have probably been more articles about Cindy McCain than Joe Biden in the last month. Because of this, Biden has the chance to show Americans who have no prior knowledge of his politics how well he knows the issues and how tactful he can be in the face of incompetence.