Sarah Palin could be the new Ronald Reagan

Sarah Palin could still end up as a footnote to history, the same way Geraldine Ferraro did after the Mondale-Ferraro ticket plummeted to defeat in 1984 when Ronald Reagan won his second term. Or she could be back in the coming years as a major Republican player on the national scene.

As the pick of those betting on the latter proposition, Palin did herself the best of favours last night. After widely criticised interviews with Gibson of ABC and Couric of CBS she put up a spirited performance against Joe Biden in the one and only vice-presidential debate in St Louis and showed that just like Ronald Reagan she might be shaky on the fine print but knows how to write the headlines.

The giant issues in America today are the economy and the $700bn bail-out. No one

outside the professional commentariat really wants to know whether Sarah Palin is capable of waging nuclear war or frying Afghan 'terrorists'. They want a sense that there's someone in the political tier who sounds somewhat like a human being with the same concerns as them, starting with the fear that their local bank will lock its doors in the morning.

In their debate last week neither Obama nor McCain passed this simple test. Last night Joe Biden, a silver-haired denizen of Washington in his sixth, six-year term, tried to offer himself as worried Joe Six-pack from Scranton, PA, but the act was pretty thin. Palin, despite somewhat excessive folksiness, with "gosh-darneds" and the like, did look as though she and Todd had spent some time at their kitchen table in the not-too-distant past figuring out how to pay the bills and deciding they couldn't afford health insurance.

This was no faltering Palin unable to tell Katie Couric which newspaper she read. This was a Palin fiercely denouncing, at least a dozen times across 90 minutes, "the