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Sarah Palin set the tone of the debate, according to CNN

The debate focused heavily on foreign policy issues

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin set the tone for how she would approach Thursday night's vice presidential debate before it began. Meeting Democratic rival Senator Joe Biden at center stage to shake his hand as they walked out, she greeted him warmly and said, “Nice to meet you. Hey, can I call you Joe?”

For most of the rest of the 90-minute debate at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, the Republican nominee answered like that next-door-neighbor hockey mom who just happens to be running for vice president. She sometimes seemed short on specifics and long on folksiness, as she aimed to appeal to what she called the heartland of America. She spoke of people who know what it's like to worry about not having health insurance, a worry she and her husband once shared. "I'll betcha," Palim said in answering the first question, urging anyone who wants to get a barometer on the economy to "go to a kids' soccer game on Saturday and turn to any parent there on the sideline." "Bless their hearts," she said in another answer. On the cause of the mortgage crisis: "Darn right, it was the predator lenders." About tax cuts: "Darn right, we need tax relief for Americans." Those who have debated Palin before were not surprised. "She clearly has a very canny ability to connect with people. What she says. How she says it. And her body language," said former Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles, a Democrat whom Palin defeated in 2006, about the dozen times he debated her. "But she has shown very little interest or knowledge of policy. She goes for slogans." Andrew Halcro, former Alaska state representative and a Republican who ran for governor as an independent in 2006, reckons he debated her about two dozen times. "She spoke a lot in platitudes, in populist tones," Halcro recalled. "What I call glittering generalities." Halcro didn't see anything different Thursday night. "She held her own by, in a number of those questions, not answering the question," he said Thursday night. "What was the quality of her answers? That's filling 45 seconds, but it's not saying a lot." For the course of the debate, Palin and Biden were friendly and cordial, often looking at each other when they talked. Palin had miscues, sometimes mangling the wording in her sentences or calling someone by the wrong name. She referred to Gen. David McKiernan, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, as "McClellan." Still, many pundits gave her a passing grade. "She did pretty well for what she had to do, which is to be thought of as a possible vice president without being laughed at," said Professor Richard Cohen of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Her job was to make up for her deficiencies in prior instances in which she looked unqualified and incompetent." Palin had come under a lot of criticism after recent television interviews with CBS' Katie Couric, when she stumbled through her answers to questions about foreign policy, Supreme Court rulings and which newspapers she reads. Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, also said she helped herself Thursday night. "Expectations were very low for Palin, and she exceeded them," Sabato said. "She didn't win, but she didn't lose. People tuned in to see a car crash, and there wasn't one -- on either side." Susan MacManus, a politics professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, also though Palin did well enough. Asked to score Palin on a scale of 1-10, MacManus said, "For what she was intending to do, a seven". (CNN).-