Arianna Huffington shows how shallow the left is.

Watching Biden and Palin on the same stage was like watching a tennis champion walk onto Centre Court at Wimbledon only to find himself facing an over-eager amateur from the local high school. Or as Pat Mitchell told me, “Biden was taking part in a vice presidential debate; Palin was taking part in a junior high debate.”

Here’s how Esther Dyson put it: “It’s pretty clear that Biden spent decades getting ready for this debate, learning from experience; Palin spent a couple of weeks, learning from handlers and speech coaches.”

Biden is a champion gaffer. Did she not hear him assert that Hezbollah had been run out of Lebanon?

He’s proved himself a dolt in his supposed area of expertise: wrong on the Soviet Union, wrong about Desert Storm, wrong about the surge, wrong about partitioning Iraq. Gullible people, many of them media elites, mistake his confidently delivered twaddle as erudition. God help us.

But boy, he has all that experience! What a pro!

Huffington fumes:

The moment that most drove me to want to send her a book on Greek gods and heroes was her head-scratching response to the question about her Achilles heel. She apparently didn’t know what that meant since she spent her allotted time listing all of her attributes as opposed to her most glaring weakness.

Let’s go to the transcript:

IFILL: Let’s talk conventional wisdom for a moment. The conventional wisdom, Gov. Palin with you, is that your Achilles heel is that you lack experience. Your conventional wisdom against you is that your Achilles heel is that you lack discipline, Sen. Biden. What id it really for you, Gov. Palin? What is it really for you, Sen. Biden? Start with you, governor.

PALIN: My experience as an executive will be put to good use as a mayor and business owner and oil and gas regulator and then as governor of a huge state, a huge energy producing state that is accounting for much progress towards getting our nation energy independence and that’s extremely important…

Or perhaps Palin figured out she didn’t need to answer a stupid question. Here is how Biden responded:

BIDEN: You’re very kind suggesting my only Achilles Heel is my lack of discipline.

Others talk about my excessive passion. I’m not going to change. I have 35 years in public office. People can judge who I am. I haven’t changed in that time.

Boasting, boasting, boasting.

BIDEN: And, by the way, a record of change — I will place my record and Barack’s record against John McCain’s or anyone else in terms of fundamental accomplishments. Wrote the crime bill, put 100,000 cops on the street, wrote the Violence Against Women Act, which John McCain voted against both of them, was the catalyst to change the circumstance in Bosnia, led by President Clinton, obviously.

Then Biden segued into his chokeup moment about his wife dying and his son being hurt, like an actor summoning a sad memory to make a performance seem real.

Huffington ate it up.

In the greatest disconnect of the evening, Palin repeatedly went to the Reagan well, offering up such Gipper classics as “there you go again” and that “shining city on the hill.” But, really, during a week in which John McCain hopped on board Bush’s $700 billion bailout, did Palin not see how incongruous it was to insist that government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem?

And declare that all we need to get this country back on track is for the government to get out of our way? Isn’t that what got us where we are today?

No, it did not.

An activist government started the mortgage meltdown ball rolling with its affirmative action lending initiatives. Then a quasi-government entity (which greased plenty of Democrat pols to keep hands off) enabled lenders to write risky loans and send them up the food chain.

Left alone, banks never would have made these loans.

Just who is clueless? Huffington also gripes about the way Palin talks. Anyone who’s heard Arianna’s Greek screech can only chuckle.

On that note, Victor Davis Hanson wrote about Palin:

Much of Palin’s appeal and much of why she apparently grates on others is her accent, colloquialisms, grammar, seeming simplicity, and mannerisms—which are a lot like the wily, sing-songy voiced hero of Fargo,  Marge Gunderson. In her methodical, seemingly plodding way, the pregnant Marge systematically figures out the complex criminal labyrinth, and then in courageous fashion wades into the thicket unaware perhaps of the danger from the supposedly more clever involved, but confident that what has worked for her in the past and gotten her this far will see her through just fine as usual. 

Fair or not, Palin is the emblem of underestimated Middle Americans wading in over their heads, not changing with the times, and in the end finishing the job and outsmarting the rest. Six-term Senator, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee Joe Biden, once fervent supporter of an Iraqi war (dating back to the Clinton years), once fervent opponent of the war, once fervent advocate of trisecting Iraq, once fervent critic of Obama on Iraq, once fervent surge won’t//will work, once fervent everything…, apparently didn’t see Fargo.