Sarah Palin succeeded in showing she's not out of her league in the debate with Joe Biden.
That may have saved her personal political reputation, after a couple of bad weeks.

But it didn't turn the tide of the election. After all, Biden probably won that debate, if barely - and he and Obama were already ahead. People generally vote for the presidential candidate anyway, not the vice-president. The 70 million Americans who watched may have been influenced, but according to the polls, few were swayed enough to change their votes. The polls favor Obama. He has more votes, and he has more money; McCain stopped campaigning in Michigan to save some of that money.

It's worth noting that Obama and the Democrats are big recipients of donations from the finance industry. Of course, so are the Republicans. Obama got more Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac campaign money than McCain, but that was probably because the wealthy executives figure he'll win the election - and they're probably right. What we're seeing in the debates is entertaining political theater, but so far, no game-changer.

McCain keeps insisting he's different from Bush, and he used to be; but he cast his lot with Bush when he agreed to the Iraq War - even though he wanted to wage it differently - and when he changed his mind on extending the Bush Tax Cuts.
After those cuts went into effect, our already-huge national debt ballooned, and it has kept growing every year since, with a constant stream of annual deficits. And now, McCain wants to keep those tax cuts in effect - not that a Democratic Congress would let him.
In the first debate, both candidates were questioned about how they were going to pay for the $700 Billion Bailout - and neither stepped up to the plate. McCain talked about controlling earmarks and putting a spending freeze on a few programs. Obama correctly called those proposals too small, then declined to name any cuts at all which he himself would make.

Then, less than a week later, both candidates voted for an even more expensive bailout. The U.S. Senate had loaded it with added tax loopholes, subsidies, and, yes, earmarks - just what McCain had complained about in the first debate. The $700 Billion Bailout had become an $830 Billion Bailout, and neither McCain nor Obama tried to cut it down to size.

But Obama, at least, had not railed against "earmarks" in the first debate. Condemning them, and then voting for them, hurt McCain - not as much as his earlier comment, several weeks ago, that the U.S. economy was "fundamentally sound" - but, taken together, McCain hardly looks like an economic expert.

So the economy has, politically, broken Obama's way. People have seen him as more able to handle it than McCain. And this election year, the economy is everything.

McCain did have a chance to do something maverick-style and dramatic. He could have changed his mind about the tax cuts, saying the state of the economy requires drastic action, and the government needs that money to fund bailouts. But politicians don't like to promise pain, and taxes are painful.
Just the interest on the $11 Trillion National Debt makes up a quarter of the government's annual budget - a budget that was in the red even before the bailout. Each year there's a deficit, the overall debt gets worse.

And the party that must deal with that debt will be the party in power. Barring an unforeseen political earthquake, that party will be the Democrats - in both the White House and in Congress. And then, as they say, comes the hard part.

Winning an election is one thing. Actually governing is a different matter.