If there’s a group of Americans who really understand what the average voter is thinking

It’s surely highly-paid TV pundits who are completely obsessed with bizarrely involuted meta-critiques of politics as infotainment theater.

Yglesias is spot on regarding this, but I think what he’s saying can be extended to the blogosphere as well. We forget that most Americans, and in particular most Americans whose presidential votes aren’t already cast in concrete, don’t follow this stuff with anything like the obsessiveness of political junkies. They don’t “grade on a curve,” they don’t care about the expectations game, and a lot of them hadn’t spent five minutes thinking about Sarah Palin or for that matter Joe Biden before last night.

So when they saw Biden and Palin together, they didn’t engage in some hyper-complicated meta-analysis of the symbolic meaning of blah blah blah in the context of yadda yadda yadda. They thought, by solid margins if the post-debate polls are accurate, what you would expect previously unengaged people of normal intelligence without strong ideological biases to think: that Biden was on the whole more impressive.