Below The Beltway

Delaware’s Governor has appointed a long-time aide to Joe Biden to fill his Senate seat, but it looks like it’s just a temp job:
Ted Kaufman, a longtime aide to Joe Biden, will be appointed by Delaware Gov. Ruth Ann Minner to fill the vacancy created by the vice president-elect once he resigns from the Senate.
Kaufman [...]

John Enisgn apparently hasn’t drunk the Kool-Aid:

By the way, Ensign is also right that the McCain campaign badly mishandled Palin’s roll-out as the VP Nominee, which is why any attempt to pin McCain’s problems on her alone is absurd.

Tina Fey returned to Saturday Night Live again to spoof Sarah Palin and Thursday’s VP debate:
NEW YORK (AP) — It’s starting to feel like Tina Fey is running for vice president.
Fey again returned to “Saturday Night Live” to play Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin as the sketch comedy show continued to pull out all [...]

A new Rasmussen poll reports that voters gave Joe Biden a slight over Sarah Palin in judging Thursday’s debate:
The Vice Presidential debate on Thursday night attracted a bigger television audience than the Presidential debate a week earlier, but is not likely to have much of an impact on the results of Election 2008.
Forty-five percent (45%) [...]

Just in case you missed it, here is the complete video of Thursday’s debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin:

H/T: Donklephant

Last night’s Vice-Presidential debate had the best ratings for a political debate since 1992:
Thursday’s highly anticipated face-off between Alaska governor Sarah Palin and Delaware senator Joe Biden may be the most-watched debate in 16 years.
Last night’s event totaled a 45.0 overnight meter-market household rating, according to Nielsen Media Research.
That’s 42% higher than Friday’s presidential debate [...]

More reactions to last night’s debate from across the blogosphere.
Patrick Ruffini @ The Next Right is among those on the right who think Palin did a bang-up job:
A major contributing factor to conservative despair these last two weeks is that the fear that the Palin choice would be defined as a warped historical error. Conservative [...]

Two snap polls of uncommitted voters who watched the Vice-Presidential debate say that Biden won handily:
The first round of snap polls give the debate to Joe Biden, by sizable margins.
CBS polled 473 uncommitted debate-watchers, and found that 46% say Biden won, 21% say Palin won, and 33% say it was a tie.
While both candidates saw [...]

A few of the more interesting immediate reaction posts from around the political blogosphere.
Marc Ambinder:
Averaging expectations, style and points, it was a wash. Partisans have reason to be satisfied; I honestly have no idea how undecided voters will react (although CBS’s panel of them gave Biden an edge.)
But the topline here is that, when [...]

Going in to this debate, the focus was entirely and completely on Sarah Palin. Thanks largely to a series of less than stellar interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, the initial excitement about Palin had diminished to the point where polls were clearly indicating that she was a serious drag on McCain’s electoral chances.
Therefore, [...]