Joe Biden's fight with Sarah Palin

last updated 8 January 2015

Sarah Palin and Vice President Joe Biden traded barbs in the last days of campaigning before Tuesday's congressional election in upstate New York. Stumping for Democrat Bill Owens, Biden said Palin’s “Drill, Baby, Drill” energy policy was simplistic. (Watch Joe Biden slam Sarah Palin.) Palin, who backed Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman, shot back via Facebook, saying, “We’re tired of folks in Washington distorting our message and hampering our nation’s progress: Hoffman, Baby, Hoffman!” Why are the two 2008 rivals squaring off over an obscure House race?

Hoffman and Owens are pawns: The contestants in this “rural outpost” are just “proxies for bigger forces,” says Charles Cooper in CBSNews.com. Sarah Palin and Tea Party conservatives think this is their moment to seize control of the GOP's future. And Biden and the Democrats are using the occasion to paint conservative Republicans as a bunch of "hysterical" radicals.

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Biden is trying to save Democrats from a GOP sweep: With gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey looking bleak for Democrats, says Johanna Neuman in the Los Angeles Times, Biden’s "last-minute rescue mission" to upstate New York has a more immediate goal -- keeping the party from losing "the trifecta on Tuesday." But Hoffman entered election day with a double-digit poll lead, so Democrats are comforting themselves by saying that the Republican Party is hurting itself by purging moderates in favor of candidates like Hoffman.

Palin is the left's favorite target: Joe Biden is just "working off a script" by attacking Sarah Palin, says Allahpundit in Hot Air. Palin's early, "high-profile backing of Hoffman was key to pushing out GOP moderate Dede Scozzafava, but she stayed off the campaign trail. Still, Palin is the Democrats' new "boogeyman," so Biden thinks by making her an issue he can get people who hate her to vote for Bill Owens.