Posted on 10/12/2012 12:35:48 AM PDT by nathanbedford
I think I misjudged the debate in real-time.
As the debate commenced Paul Ryan appeared to be nervous and he appeared nervous to a diminishing degree throughout the entire debate until the end when he recovered well, as witnessed by his frequent reaching for the water glass. As a result of his nervousness I thought he was tentative. Ironically, Biden might have sensed this nervousness or tentativeness in Ryan and overstepped.
When Biden made his first "buffoonish" intrusion I said to myself, "thank God!" I felt that Biden had made a signal error but I misjudged its impact by regarding it as a distraction. Evidently, it has become the very essence of the debate in the public mind.
Why I saw the debate so differently from how the world saw the debate is an object lesson in how far we political junkies can be isolated from the bulk of the electorate who do not live and breathe politics but who live normal lives. Perhaps it explains why the rest of the world does not vote as I would have them do. As a junkie, I felt increasingly frustrated over Ryan's performance for his failure to counterpunch effectively and, ultimately, because he could not shape the debate and so was predominantly on the defensive.
For example, Biden made the indefensible claim that the administration did not know about the requests for additional security in Benghazi. Ryan should have pointed out that that very day under oath the security people had stated that they begged for security. Worse, security was not furnished but was stripped away. Ryan should have pointed out that both State Department and the intelligence branches have disputed the administration's story. But most important, Ryan should have said "maybe that was because Obama went back to bed when he got his 3 AM phone call and only got up to go to Las Vegas. Maybe he the president would had known what was going on in Benghazi if he had attended his national security briefings. He did not take one briefing in the previous six days." Told in the correct tone of voice so as not to offend, I believe that would have destroyed the Obama administration for foreign affairs. As it was, Biden fought it to a draw or nearly so, a remarkable achievement considering the appalling facts.
But these are only illustrations of the general pattern which struck me at the time, which is to say in real time, in which Ryan permitted Biden to dominate and to kick up enough dust to obscure the grotesque failures of the Obama administration in foreign affairs and in domestic economic affairs. And that leads me to my larger point.
I believe that Benghazi should have been used as a metaphor for the failure of the Obama administration in foreign policy and even in domestic policy. Ryan said, but did not set as the predicate of the debate, that the Obama foreign policy is in flames, literally, as the Arab world breaches our embassies and murders our ambassadors and security chiefs throughout Islam. The important principle is that Ryan should have established at the very beginning the principle that Obama's policy of apology and appeasement has failed. It has not just failed with the Arab world, it has failed with China and Russia. To support that portion of the argument he should have cited Obama's on microphone remarks to Russian President Medvedev. Let Biden defend that episode for the rest of the debate. How many people even know or recall that episode? Oh, what an opportunity lost!
This would, I believe, have thrown Biden on the defense and caused the moderator to open the question of the competency of Obama's foreign policy. It would have changed the entire course of the debate.
Just as Hurricane Katrina became a metaphor for the failure of the Bush administration, representing the perceived incompetence of the Bush administration in Iraq, so should the Republicans make Benghazi a metaphor for the failures of the Obama administration. That metaphor applies to the failure to recover from the great recession. It is worse than a metaphor of incompetence, it is a metaphor for epic fail.
It is essential in these debates to set the predicate. The predicate for the tragic failure of the economic recovery is that Obama has squandered trillions of dollars without effecting a recovery and he is driving us us toward a fiscal cliff which will destroy those very programs like Medicare and Social Security that Biden kept insisting Romney/Ryan would themselves destroy if elected. If the country goes over the cliff there will be no Social Security, no Medicare, no jobs. The context is, how do we save the country; the proper context is not whether Ryan's reforms are palatable. Because we did not set the predicate we lost control.
Again, the idea is to put Biden on the defensive. If we do not accept the imperative of fiscal crisis compelling reform of Medicare and taxes etc., then we are put to defending our reforms and Biden gets to point out that his ostrich policy of lack of reform is less painful than our reforms. Because the predicate was not set, Ryan was on the defensive in the course of much of the debate until the very end when he began to make these larger points. But for most of the debate, it seemed to the uninformed that Ryan somehow failed in a duty which he somehow owed to the listeners to provide specifics for his plan. Think about it, the Democrats govern without a budget for three years and the debate is about whether or not the Romney/Ryan plan has adequate specifics.
So I was as relieved as I was surprised when I saw the results of the CNN poll favoring Ryan 48% to Biden's 44%. In my opinion, as a technical matter only, Biden delivered the better performance apart from the smirking. He was more self-assured. His voice was brilliantly modulated. He expressed himself far more clearly than did Ryan. He had more passion. He was credible even though he was saying incredible things and defending the indefensible. If it were not for the buffoonery, I believe the poll results might have been reversed.
I underestimated the visual impact of Biden's buffoonery. I thought it was a 60-40 victory for Biden before one adjusted for the buffoonery. That should show how dangerous it is to rely on one's own perceptions in these affairs. As a white male who loves the thrust and parry of politics, I was not personally disturbed by Biden's smirking, although I of course acknowledged that his conduct would have an impact on the rest of the public. I simply misjudged the power of that impact, especially among women. I put it down to nervousness for which Biden was overcompensating. When he heard a phrase from Ryan which triggered a Pavlovian response in which he had been trained over the last six days of debate preparation, Biden was happy and relieved because his internal computer told him to relax, it had the canned reply readily available in random access memory.
Obviously, the rest of the public saw Biden's behavior as offensive and inappropriate. I simply saw it as a unaccountable breach of good debating tactics in an old campaigner which was generated by insecurity. Biden has not disappointed his reputation as the gaffe that keeps on gaffing. Biden even as an old pro must carry somewhere within him the uneasy knowledge that he is defending the indefensible, that he is covering for a record of failure, that every single issue that comes up might potentially expose him as an exponent of failure before millions of people. When his inner computer told him that he had the proper canned response to Ryan ready to go, he was relieved and so it came out involuntarily as a smirk or a derisive laugh.
On the other hand, it might just be that Biden an insufferable Lib who goes through life smug in his conviction that he is superior to conservatives and that he actually has the better side of the argument.
All of this is mildly interesting I guess, but the real question is, does this debate alter the trajectory of the campaign? I tend to agree with the conventional wisdom that it does not. We shall see in the coming days if the Romney surge dissipates or not. The big question is whether Romney's momentum generated in the first debate will gain critical mass and sweep the election before it like an avalanche or whether it will dissipate as, in Churchill's metaphor, a bucket full of water splashed onto the floor which begins as a powerful flood and slowly loses speed and power as spreads. I am inclined to believe that the Obama slide will lose speed but not its direction and will not bottom out until it finds its demographic base level of dependency and race.
If the Romney surge continues at its current pace, I do not think Obama will have enough opportunity in the next debate to derail Romney trajectory short of 270. Biden's buffoonery will not have affected Obama's base but this election has now focused on the undecideds and Republican intensity. Having seen the reaction in the polls, the focus groups, the television pundits, and the reports from Tweeter world, I now believe Biden's buffoonery aborted any possible movement of the undecideds towards Obama while it only intensified Romney's base. Biden might, at best, have slowed the pace of disintegration in the Obama base but the Democrats need more.
I think it is important that women, a demographic key to Obama's victory but where Obama has been losing strength lately, will have found Biden's performance offputting.
So far, Republicans have produced one brilliant debate and the Democrats have produced one pathetic and one ineffectual performance.
Because I enjoy your posts and it is late...to be read later.
The only thing memorable coming out of this debate are Biden’s antics and claim that the embassy personnel on Libya did not ask for more security.
Pugnacious partisans such as ourselves wanted to see more pushback, but I’m sure Biden’s behavior was anticipated by the Romney campaign and the message to Ryan was to ignore these antics. Having a back and forth slugfest would have been more viscerally satisfying, but it would have done nothing to help the Romney campaign.
"Having a back and forth slugfest would have been more viscerally satisfying, but it would have done nothing to help the Romney campaign."
Which is why I was careful to require:
"Told in the correct tone of voice so as not to offend,"
Nathan, did you see my Biden Wifebeater article?
I envy those who have great writing skills. Thank you. They knew the moderator would be pro-Biden. Ryan was to stay cool and let Biden, with the help of the moderator, become overly confident. Ryan saw it happen, needled Biden, then the Biden laughter to cover his anger. Ryan spoke mainly to the Independents. Biden was appealing to the base. The shrewd one was Ryan which is why he won the debate. The less comments he made the less there is to scrutinize the next day by the obamamedia.
He probably should have been armed with some more one liners. He had a pretty good one for the 47% attack - equating it to Biden’s gaffes.
Biden is a real shark though, and has been debating and arguing before Ryan was even in diapers. There would have been a real danger to attempt a toe to toe exchange, with little upside other than our visceral pleasure.
The important thing is he walked away without any gaffes, or Dan Quayle “deer in the headlights” type of moment. This allows the campaign to return to the Romney momentum story.
I also think this play it safe strategy by Ryan and Biden’s hyper aggressiveness shows that both campaigns believe that Romney truly is ahead and it isn’t just some debate bounce polling aberration.
I wanted to see Ryan slug Martha, the so-called moderator. But you're right, Ryan acted more presidential and adult-like. Biden may have satisfied the far-left democrat base but his joker/jerk manerisms turned off independents and probably swung some on-the-fence democrats to the Romney/Ryan side. Many realized how buffoonish Biden looked and realized his interruptions were an attempt to drown out Ryan's far more convincing statements.
I think your analysis is good.
I don’t think Paul Ryan had the intention of going for the jugular and was intentionally playing it safe.
I was neither exceptionally happy nor disappointed with Ryan.
I actually think the safe mode was tactically correct play to make in light of Biden’s performance.
Conversely, I think Biden was advised to do the opposite.
However, the election all comes down to getting votes of white middle class women in the midwest.
This is where the Obama/Biden/Liberal Arrogance does them their biggest disservice.
Biden[’s act might play well for MSNBC, but neither campaign should try to earn the votes of the New York/Washington liberal media.
They should be trying to earn the vote of my mom.
Now who did a better job of getting the vote of a mom in the midwest, Biden or Ryan?
Ryan is obviously the clear winner from a practical non-ideological. point of view and Biden is a big loser, a bigger loser than the liberal media conventional wisdom believes right now.
May I promote this to Freeper Editorial?
Bottomline: Ryan consciously let Biden interrupt and take over the debate.
Very interesting. I simply could not look at Biden. He just made me so overwrought. I didn't think one logical thought about his behavior, LOL.
bfl
Well said Nathan.
The weakness of our ticket wins by default. You could have creamed the jerk, but I guess we have moved on to a repeat of the kinder, gentler conservative era.
I remembered from Biden’s debate with Palin 4 years ago that he has the brilliant ability to spin facts out of thin air on the fly, made to order, a perfect fit for the needs of the moment. He can then freely contradict himself a moment later as the need changes.
And in the heat of the debate, he is almost never called on it. Whether Palin or Ryan, they will be momentarily dumbfounded, not knowing how to respond, and the moment passes. He got away with it by sheer brazenness.
He did it again tonight. It will be days before the fact checkers unravel everything he said, and by that time it won’t matter. Too much of the audience is impressed with his obvious knowledge and command of facts on every subject, impressed with his bold confidence, and too few will ever figure out that he was making most of it up on the fly.
I remember in the debate with Palin he went on about how we and the French had kicked Hezbollah’s ass and Palin stared at him, mystified, and the moment was lost. Or his remarks about FDR’s televised fireside chats. Tonight almost nothing he said about Libya was true, or Afghanistan, or Syria, or the budget, the church, or anything else. But he said it with supreme confidence.
In his way, Obama did much the same thing. But Romney had enough command of the facts to sweep all that aside, and when he didn’t, he just said what he had to say and made the president answer him instead of getting into the weeds with Obama’s alternate reality. I think Ryan tried to do the same thing but he got steam rolled a bit.
I agree with your point that, unless we hammer the point about the deficit, which got short shrift (and always sounds like an accounting problem when Ryan talks about it), then the solutions to the problem will always be spun as GOP stingyness and successfully so. The more we try to explain about tax rates and budgets the more we sound like we’re just money-grubbing. We have to talk about freedom, the big stuff. As soon as we get drawn into talking about budget cuts we’re hammered as Scrooges who hate poor people. We have to keep to the high ground and talk about big subjects and stay out of the weeds.
The smirk, 4 minutes plus seconds to talk, and interrupting NINETY SIX times showed me Biden’s ineffectiveness.
Instead of posting a new thread... I post the mp3 podcast of Rusty Humphries show here. It really sounds like the people posting it cut up the podcast which is a shame. They could have posted all the debate which started the hour Rusty starts or they could have just started with Rusty’s comments. But instead they started with the last 30 minutes of the debate so that is first. But the point for posting it is the comments after the debate. Well anybody who cares can listen to it.
http://www.trn1.com/uploads/automp3/rusty/Rusty_10-11-2012.mp3
Also a montage of Biden which is longer than the RNC ad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwykoYWf_40
Well since the podcast of Rusty is cut up then here is the debate video from youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3roG09O6T4
Sure, Laz
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