The McCain campaign has been lowering the expectations bar to give Alaska Governor Sarah Palin a fighting chance against Senator Joseph Biden in the debate scheduled to begin in a few minutes.

It is a fallacy to to award a contest to someone who does "better than expected," especially when the expectations gap is as wide as this. It is apalling that the MSM has been assisting the McCain campaign in establishing such a devious standard.

If I were to play a game of chess against Garry Kasparov and resign after 30 moves facing either checkmate or a ruinous loss of material making defending against checkmate impossible, I might be said to have done better than expected, but the fact is I still lost the game. The standard of winning in chess remains checkmating one's opponent. It is the only standard.

There is only standard in tonight's for even a satisfactory performance is whether the candidate presents himself as a credible potential president of the United States. In her televised interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, Mrs. Palin has failed to meet that standard by demonstrating an alarming ignorance current affairs (she did not know what the Bush Doctrine is) and US history (she could not name a Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade to which she could take exception). These were not trick questions. One could easily expect such questions on a high school civics exam.

Furthermore, she supports a position on crossing into Pakistan in a hypothetical pursuit of al Qaida that is supported by Senator Obama and opposed by Senator McCain; if there was any trick here, one could blame it on Senator McCain, whose stand on the issue is counter-intuitive to one that he would be expected to take. In a gaffe related to the present financial crisis, she suggested that Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac had always been government owned and operated. Most infamously, she has given as her idea of foreign policy experience to be living in a state from which Russia can be seen across a maritime border.

Mrs. Palin begins tonight's debate not only as an underdog, but in a deep hole she has dug herself. For this, the only person she has to blame other than herself is Senator McCain, who rolled the dice and gambled on an unknown quantity, unknown even to him, on the chance that she would emerge as a diamond in the rough rather than a poor student who doesn't do her homework.

Mrs. Palin's public performance thus far shows that her only qualifications to be president or vice president are those specified in the US Constitution: she is a natural-born American citizen over 35 years of age. There is no reason to expect more of her tonight, even if she manages to string talking points together coherently enough to make Tina Fey work Saturday to come up satire. Coherent nonsense is still nonsense.

Mrs. Palin's task tonight is not simply to do better than expected, but to show that she has the knowledge expected of the president. She doen't even necessarily have to look better than Senator Biden, she just needs to look credible.

My bet is she doesn't.