Debate day reading list: how to prep for Sarah Palin and Joe Biden's battle
In case you haven't heard, Sarah Palin and Joe Biden will square off for their first and only vice presidential debate tonight. We will be live-blogging it here, beginning at 5:30 p.m. PST, like we did for the first presidential debate.
Palin and Biden have been preparing for this for days (we've seen photographic proof). So The Ticket thinks it's only fair that the audience brush up a bit, too.
So we present you with a debate day reading list -- a compilation of the best debate-related stories from all over the Internet:
In a major must-read, our own Stephen Braun and Tom Hamburger go to Alaska to find out what kind of an opponent Palin was in the Alaskan gubernatorial debates.
Meanwhile Politico asks a psychic her predictions of which candidate will perform better (the verdict: the stars are not aligned for Palin).
Politico also has a story that probes Palin's debate history.
Our friends at The Swamp lay out five goals that each candidate will try to accomplish, and veteran political reporter Cathleen Decker writes in The Times about the stakes if they don't.
And finally, there’s an LA Times opinion piece that calls for the role of vice president to be abolished completely. Constitutional scholar Bruce Ackerman has an interesting point. But don't let it keep you away from the debate -- or our coverage -- tonight.
-- Kate Linthicum
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Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
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Who is this Barry Obama? What's he ever done?
Posted by: steve rodriguez | October 02, 2008 at 04:29 PM
I am anxious to count the number of gaffes by Biden that will be ignored, brushed off, or chuckled about in contrast to the outrage over any gaffe of Palin's. Even your piece above concentrates on Palin rather than a balance between the two. Do you ever wonder if the public likes Palin precisely because the media doesn't?
Posted by: Douglas | October 02, 2008 at 04:31 PM
THIS DEBATE IS NOT CHANGING MY VOTE. I ALREADY KNOW ENOUGH! McCain Palin chose not to give us the information we needed to make a decision so we went and got it from everyone else. So now they can just get to steppin
Posted by: Angeloo | October 02, 2008 at 04:32 PM
Then man who will Unite us Barrack Obama is recruiting people to protest Sarah Palins appearance in Dallas today! Check-out the Obama campaign website! So much for unity and free speech!
Posted by: steve rodriguez | October 03, 2008 at 10:24 AM