Joe Biden did his job last night, which was to buck up Democrats and liberals who had gone into an emotional tailspin following President Obama’s disastrous debate performance and the ensuing poll meltdown. They wanted aggression and argumentation and confrontation — and got them in spades.
Paul Ryan didn’t have to play a savior’s role. He stuck with the Romney playbook, which is to do everything to convince voters that the Republican ticket is strong enough and sensible enough and serious enough to earn their vote.
Biden dominated. At every moment, every second, he was the pivot around whom the debate revolved. When he spoke, he mostly yelled, until the last third, when he began to whisper.
His emotions controlled the mood; when he was supposed to be silent he muttered; when he wasn’t muttering he was grimacing, laughing, rolling his eyes, throwing up his hands.
He was hot, Ryan was cool. He was aggressive, Ryan was modulated. Biden ate his Wheaties; Ryan had a salad.
The Democrats needed the jolt they got. Republicans might have gotten a little energized themselves — by just how repugnant they thought Biden’s conduct was.
Ryan was fine; Biden was something special. I’m not sure that was a good thing.
Debate aggression can be problematic. In a face-to-face confrontation in front of a huge audience that includes people whose minds aren’t yet made up, it’s probably better to stick in the shiv with a calm expression and a slight smile.
Recall that Rick Lazio never recovered from the moment when he crossed over to Hillary Clinton’s podium during their 2000 senate race and“invaded her space” by thrusting a document at her. Obviously, there was a gender element there that was not at play here, but in truth, everybody has had the experience of tussling with someone exactly like Biden last night.
Biden was every raging older relative you’ve ever made the mistake of arguing with at a family dinner. When he talked, he talked and talked; when you talked, he laughed in your face and could barely contain himself.
If the others in your family liked what he had to say before he said it, you were surely rooting him on and forgiving of his excesses — but if they didn’t, they surely thought he was an unseemly boor.
And those who didn’t really have an opinion about the subject under discussion probably just wanted to crawl under the table, which won’t lead to fond memories of the belligerent one.
Perhaps even more important, given the nature of politics in the Internet age, Biden’s behavior lent itself to second- and third-day ridicule. Just as Howard Dean’s “yeearrgh” call in Iowa in 2004 turned him into a laughingstock and Al Gore’s sighs and eyerolls made him satirical fodder for “Saturday Night Live,” Biden’s wild expressions are going to launch a billion YouTubes and still photos and those animated GIFs that will populate Facebook and melt down Twitter and clog Gmail.
They will remind people of what was unquestionably the most memorable aspect of the debate, since the policy disputes were both predictable and rendered in so much Beltway shorthand that they were probably hard for non-junkies to follow.
Biden may have made Democrats happy — but I think that, by the time the week is out, he’s going to be even more of a low-comedy figure than he already is.