When Sarah Palin joined the Republican ticket last month, according to the LA Times’s Faye Fiore today:

a fickle press corps deserted [Senator Joe Biden] for Alaska. Palin’s campaign plane was so full that they had to kick people off, Biden’s so empty that reporters had their choice of rows to stretch out and take a nap.

But in recent days something changed.

A “sign of the fading Palin mystique,” per Fiore? Katie Couric’s presence at a recent Biden campaign event in Ohio.

(So: Nap-time’s over?)

Thanks to Fiore’s presence on Biden’s trail we now know that Biden is a close-talker (which made Fiore uncomfortable but, she observed, seems to work well with real people in Ohio). And, that Biden talks a lot about his working class roots — which, again, the crowds like —but Fiore couldn’t help but notice that “for a regular guy, Biden is very well-tailored,” that “the break in his gray slacks is exquisite.”