Tactical Debate Suggestion For Biden:
How to Defuse a "Zinger":
Lessons from the Huxley-Wilberforce Debate

Given Palin's cluelessness, she can't win on issues. So her handlers are frantically working on ways in which she can win.

Surely they've noticed the buzz about "zingers." Anybody can deliver them, Palin's shown that she's fairly good at it, and they can be written ahead of time by the evil worker drones.

She'll be loaded for bear.

(Or: she'll be loaded for studies of bear DNA, blah blah paternity issue yadda yadda yadda....)

Biden needs to be ready for this.

My guess:
This means: don't try to fight her zinger for zinger--she might very well win. Why enter into a type of combat in which she's at least roughly equally skillful?

So: be prepared to take on zingers directly, undermining them in a rational manner.

An exemplar of this:

T.H. Huxley to Wilberforce in the 1860 debate on evolution. As you know, Wilberforce asked Huxley whether he was descended from apes on his mother's or father's side. Huxley famously responded:

…that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with…success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real points at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.

Huxley wins not by descending to Wilberforce's level, going zinger against zinger, but by mantaining the high ground, turning the baseness of Wilberforce's attack against him...and, incidentally, saying something true and edifying to the audience as well.

Biden should be prepared to undermine the zingers by hitting them head on--by saying e.g.: "look, this is serious business, and Senator Obama and I treat it like serious business. We violate our sacred duty to our country by obfuscating important issues with clever little quips, prefabricated zingers cooked up by speech-writers and tested on focus groups, and sly insults aimed at distracting people from the issues. Save the "zingers" for campaign rallies, Governor. Here we need to be serious."

People better at this than I am could think of a better way to say this.

Biden might even go for the preemptive strike early on, saying something like: "This is our only chance to talk to the American people. We need to be serious and detailed. To try to fool people with quips and zingers is to admit that one doesn't understand the real issues that face us. So let's be serious here. A tip for viewers: watch out for zingers--if you hear one, ask yourself: what was that supposed to distract me from?"

This would have the additional salutary effect of keeping Biden from shooting himself in the ass with a botched zinger attempt.