I manually extracted Biden’s and Palin’s remarks at the debate from the transcript and fed them into Wordle to create these word clouds. First, Senator Joe Biden:

And then, Governor Sarah Palin:

It seems the primary topic of the evening was John McCain, and to a lesser extent Barack Obama. That makes sense and fits perfectly into each veep candidate’s objectives for the evening – Palin to build McCain up, and Biden to tear him down.