Vice President Joe Biden took Americans on a one-way trip to
Malarkey-ville last night, with a weirdly aggressive debate
performance in which, according to one count, he interrupted his
Republican rival 86 times. Even many of those who generally
approved of what Democrat spinners referred to as Biden’s “happy
warrior” act expressed concern that the vice president was, to
quote CNN’s Gloria Borger, “condescending at times” toward
Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan.
Make that “condescending at all times,” and you may
have a consensus that would include even the debate’s liberal
moderator, Martha Raddatz of ABC News. Biden’s behavior resembled
the hypomanic phase of bipolar disorder, as he grinned
incongruously or faked laughter in reaction to Ryan’s answers,
rudely scoffed at the Republican’s policy proposals as “bluster”
and “loose talk,” and bulldozed past whatever feeble attempts
Raddatz made to halt his repeated filibusters.
Arrogant? Overbearing? Angry? If those are your ideal qualities
in a vice president, Biden’s your man. In the inevitable
post-debate panel discussions over who “won” the debate, even
conservative discussants generally credited Biden with having
accomplished his basic mission, namely to counteract the
demoralization among Democrats caused by President Obama’s tepid
and listless debate performance last week against Mitt Romney. (See
“Mitt’s
Biggest Turnaround Yet,” Oct. 4.) Biden’s aggressive tactics
against Ryan were cheered by the Democratic “base,” by which term
of course I mean, Chris Matthews.
“A clear victory for Joe Biden, looking at the key issues people
care about,”
Matthews enthused on MSNBC after the debate ended, without
bothering to explain how he knows which issues are “key.” However,
CNN’s post-debate “flash” poll showed viewers narrowly favoring
Ryan, 48 percent to 44 percent for Biden, and also scored Ryan the
more “likeable” of the two candidates, by a 53-43 margin. On Fox
News, meanwhile, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer was
reluctant to award the win to Ryan, saying the youthful House
Budget Committee chairman showed “excessive deference” to Biden.
Yet Krauthammer also criticized Biden, describing the vice
president’s manner as “disrespectful.” At the conservative Hot Air
site, the blogger known as Allahpundit summarized the debate in a
headline: “Angry
old man yells at Paul Ryan for 90 minutes.”
Was the debate, therefore, a win-win? Not exactly. Grant that
Biden achieved his goal of halting the panic that set in among
Democrats after Romney mopped the floor with Obama in last week’s
debate. Still, the vice president’s hectoring performance Thursday
in Danville, Kentucky, wasn’t likely to endear him to undecided
voters. Meanwhile, what Krauthammer called Ryan’s “deference”
enabled the Republican to counteract the demonized image of him as
a heartless budget-slasher that Democrats would like to exploit.
Pleasant and calm, yet firm and clearly well-prepared, Ryan
established himself as competent and charmingly human, never losing
his cool while Biden lectured and berated him.
The tone of the debate was set early, when Raddatz began by
asking Biden whether last month’s terrorist attack on the U.S.
consulate in Benghazi, Libya, represented an “intelligence
failure.” The vice president spoke four sentences about Libya
before going off on a tangent, defending Obama’s record (and
attacking Romney’s position) on Afghanistan and on foreign policy
generally. Obama “has led with a steady hand and clear vision;
Governor Romney, the opposite,” Biden said before concluding with a
non sequitur: “The last thing we need now is another
war.”
Ryan pounced: “When you take a look at what has happened just in
the last few weeks, they sent the U.N. ambassador out to say that
this was because of a protest and a YouTube video. It took the
president two weeks to acknowledge that this was a terrorist
attack. He went to the U.N., and in his speech at the U.N. he said
six times — he talked about the YouTube video. Look, if we are hit
by terrorists, we’re going to call it for what it is, a terrorist
attack. Our ambassador in Paris has a Marine detachment guarding
him. Shouldn’t we have a Marine detachment guarding our ambassador
in Benghazi, a place where we knew that there was an al-Qaida cell
with arms? This is becoming more troubling by the day. They first
blamed the YouTube video; now they’re trying to blame the
Romney-Ryan ticket for making this an issue.”
Ryan went on to talk about Afghanistan and Iraq. Raddatz then
questioned Ryan about Romney’s initial reaction to the Libyan
attack, but Ryan’s answer was interrupted by Biden. “Am I going to
get to say anything here?” the vice president asked and, after Ryan
attempted to continue, Biden interrupted again. “With all due
respect, that’s a bunch of malarkey,” Biden declared, saying that
“not a single thing [Ryan] said is accurate.” The Democrat went on
to say that Romney’s reaction to the Libya attack was “a political
statement which was panned by the media around the world,” and
concluded with an apparent insult to the Republicans: “I mean,
these guys bet against America all the time.”
The debate steadily degenerated, so that when they began talking
about taxes and budgets, Biden, Ryan and Raddatz took turns
interrupting each other, a
transcript showing the long stretches where every other
sentence was an interruption. Yet Biden was clearly the worst
offender in this regard, as the Weekly
Standard’s Fred Barnes saw it: “You don’t
win a nationally televised debate by being rude and obnoxious. You
don’t win by interrupting your opponent time after time after time
or by being a blowhard.… Biden’s out of control conduct … will be
long remembered — and not favorably.”
It is unlikely that Thursday’s debate will have any substantial
impact on the general trend of the campaign. Romney and Ryan have
had a week of surging momentum, while the Obama campaign has become
increasingly testy about criticism of the administration’s failure
in Libya, an irritability no doubt aggravated by polls
indicating that the Republicans have pulled ahead in key swing
states
including Florida. Next Tuesday, Romney and Obama will debate
again, this time a town-hall event in Hempstead, New York. Unless
Obama can find some way to reverse Romney’s momentum in that
meeting, there may soon be nothing left of the Democrat’s
re-election hopes except, to borrow a phrase from Biden, “bluster”
and “loose talk.”
