How 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.

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.

No one will remember what was said here....but they will remember the monkey in the left-hand TV screen. Women especially were disgusted by the antics of Biden, who looked like an ill-mannered third-grader who craved attention.

I’m surprised at the reaction to the debate. I thought this was even more lopsided than Romney vs. Obama. Ryan was clear, concise, gentlemanly, and made excellent points. Ryan showed himself to be a competent alternative and did no damage. He was more appealling to women per the dials. Romney and Ryan are very successfully gathering up the undecides and moderates with their strategy. Ryan has been debating goofs like Biden in the house for a long while. A routine win for Ryan

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.

Like all the democrats he is arrogant and has a completely delusional idea of how wise they are compared to everybody else

“, 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.”

I love reaing your posts, but the fact of the matter is that all of this administrations lies regarding the attack don’t matter to the people getting “free stuff.” They will always vote for the ones giving it away

He was credible even though he was saying incredible things and defending the indefensible.

Do you mean he "seemed" credible....?

As in how a Robert DeNiro made me really believe he was a bus driver when I was watching "A Bronx Story" the other night.

I'll just self-quote from a post I made over at Twitchy:

A VP debate is pretty much the same warm bucket of spit that the VP job is. Even if one totally trounced the other, it is unlikely to have made a a major difference in the overall race.
In reality, the main goal at a VP debate is to do no harm to the ticket. Looked at from that viewpoint, Ryan did his job. It can be argued who "won" the debate, but it would take a deranged lunatic (or the media matters paid posters here, but I repeat myself) to claim that Ryan did any harm to Romney last night.
Biden's performance is a little cloudier on that score. He probably did quite well among his base, and if (as many assume) his goal was to fire them up, he succeeded. However, the constant interruptions, and more to the point, the laughing and smirking, is already being used against Obama/Biden. Will the devastating web ad put out by the RNC get actual airtime play?

There is not much room left to give in this election. All have decided except those who do not pay attention to politics until the last few weeks of an election year. We are down to the cult of personality voters.

What you have left are the people not interested in the ideas and subjects but the people themselves and how they come across and Americans do not like jerks.

What the media had built up as a loveable gaff master came across as a nasty, overbearing, disrespectful bully. He lost the fan club vote....but worse than that he lost a lot of women who were going to vote dem on principles, he cut into vote already in their pocket.

Initially, I was also disappointed at Ryan's "taking it" of Biden's disrespect and the moderator's bias. As the debate went on, I saw it as the best course to take simply because Joe Biden would not let up. It was only toward the very end when he ran out of steam (or his buzz wore off) that he relented in the near constant barrage of laughter, jeering and weird sound effects.

I believe that this was an effort to get Ryan to lose his cool. If you remember a day or two prior there was the video released of Ryan telling the reporter not to "stuff words into his mouth". I think they were trying to goad Ryan into a response and then they could use the meme that Ryan was angry, loose cannon, did not have the temperament for office, etc.

Had Biden used the derision and ridicule sparingly, I think he could have gotten away with it, it may have been effective and may have been declared the winner.

Don, That was a great movie, as most Robert DeNiro's movies are.

I understand that the lead, played by Chazz Palminteri who wrote it, was originally offered to De Niro who declined saying he would rather play the father and that Palminteri should play the lead, which he did brilliantly.

I think Chazz Palminteri originally was a director who came to acting as a sort of afterthought.

But the movie was good because it actually had something to say, it was a morality play set in the Bronx in the 1960s. In this respect it parallels, Raging Bull, Robert De Niro's masterful portrayal of the boxer Jake LaMotta. It regularly appears on lists of the 10 best movies of all time, and it is certainly on my list. Both of these De Niro movies were set in working-class New York City in a time gone by, but not too long gone by, and both are modern biblical morality plays.

As I hinted in my about page, this is the kind of thing that appeals to me in movies and in biography, although I generally will not go to see a movie that does not have horses or sharks.

Nathan

Your assessment of Ryan’s performance is right on the mark. I thought exactly the same things and cringed at the lost opportunities, and there were many, as you yourself observe. In the end, I think that Ryan did not so much win as Biden lost.

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