If you watched the debate on Thursday and you had strong feelings one way or another about Governor Palin—whatever those feelings were—chances are those feelings are stronger.

As Gail Collins wrote on Friday in the New York Times:

“The Republicans were euphoric over Sarah Palin’s debate performance, particularly the part in which she stood tall and refrained from falling off the stage.”

After her colorful interview with Katie Couric the week before last, pretty much everyone expected her to be spectacularly disastrous.

But after walking away from the stage with such gems as “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” and by reminding Joe Biden that his wife’s “reward is in heaven,” Gov. Palin’s supporters didn’t miss a beat: they declared her the winner. Cute-as-buttons.

Never mind, for one moment, that she regarded the questions asked of her as a loosely inconsequential, nagging suggestions for what she might talk about to be ignored at her preference. Or that she seemingly couldn’t decide if she and John McCain promised strict oversight of the American financial system to better regulate private enterprise or if they vowed to angrily to expel government from private life completely. Or that half of her sentences simply did not make sense—Maureen Dowd noticed this gem: “With the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that, as governor, I was the first governor to form a climate change subcabinet to start dealing with the impacts.”

Look—we cannot say that Joe Biden mopped the floor with her. He didn’t—though to his credit, this was much less a debate than it was a two-play Broadway production with call and response (or no response, in the Governor’s case). Joe Biden himself hit a bump here and there, but he appeared to have moments of genuineness that seemed befuddling when compared with the performance that his opponent was acting out right next to him. Also, what would be the shame in picking a leader that can say what’s on her mind without having to sound like a crazy plucked out of a Horatio Alger novel? I’m not trying to be a snob; I just don’t think it’s much to ask that one of the most public faces of our country get a message across directly and clearly.

Last week, prior to the debate, a bunch of my friends who would have otherwise voted Republican agreed with me. One of the biggest fans of Senator McCain that I know said that he did not know that he could, in his right mind, support a ticket that puts Gov. Palin “a heartbeat away.” On Friday morning, everyone seemed to have forgotten the Couric interview, the Gibson interview, and the remaining media hurricane that has characterized her journey to the Naval Observatory thus far. The expectations for her going into the debate were so outrageously low that Gov. could have showed up in a Bullwinkle costume (though it’s true that people might just write this off as an Alaska thing). She avoided questions so obviously that she just proved exactly how rehearsed she was.

If you want to convince me that Gov. Palin was not a totally disastrous choice to stand beside John McCain, her performance in the debate did not do it. Au contraire, my friends—au contraire.