Here are five things we learned from Thursday night:
1. Biden brought it
We expected Ryan, not
Biden to bring a three-ring binder full of facts and figures to the
debate. It's not that the data-driven Ryan didn't show up with an arm
full of his statistics; it is just that Biden did so as well.
And Biden's aggressive offense from the very beginning drowned out Ryan until about 45 minutes into the debate. Biden's 36 years in the
Senate served him well Thursday night. Who says that delivering hundreds
of floor speeches on Capitol Hill isn't useful? The vice president also
proved wrong the critics, who predicted he was going to make a gaffe.
He didn't.
In many ways, Biden stole
a page from
Mitt Romney's debate playbook: put your head down, charge
forward and don't stop. Romney effectively employed this strategy last
week and Barack Obama was never able to recover. While Ryan put up a
fight last night, he, too, was unable to regain his footing.
An Obama-Biden campaign
official said before the debate that the vice president's goal was to
try and compare and contrast the two competing campaign's vision for the
future. Whether you agree or disagree with the specifics of the
Obama-Biden or Romney-Ryan plans, Biden did a better job of selling his
last night.
It will be several days
until we know if this debate has helped the Obama-Biden campaign stem
the political bleeding. But Biden did what he needed to do.
2. Too much Joe?
If Biden was on a mission to bring the fight to Ryan, then it appeared to be mission accomplished for the vice president.
Moments into the debate, Biden went on the attack.
"On Iraq, the president said he would end the war. Gov. Romney said that was a tragic mistake," said Biden.
Minutes later the vice
president pushed back against criticism by the Wisconsin congressman,
saying "not a single thing he said is accurate."And he called other accusations by Ryan "a bunch of stuff."
Biden went where
President Barack Obama wouldn't last week in his debate with Romney,
bringing up Romney's "47%" controversy as well as the Republican
nominee's tax rate.
And later, when Ryan discussed President John F. Kennedy's tax policies, Biden fired back: "Oh, now you're Jack Kennedy?"
"The vice president came
and showed fight. He showed his boss what it is to engage and engage
and engage and attack and attack and attack," said CNN Chief National
Correspondent John King.
"I think Joe Biden did
do his boss a lot of help," agreed Senior CNN Political Analyst David
Gergen, who's advised both Democratic and Republican presidents.
But was Biden too aggressive?
"I think Joe Biden is an
authentic person. He speaks his mind. People know him. They expect
that," Obama senior adviser David Axelrod said. "I think that
authenticity is something that people appreciate."
The Romney campaign disagreed."The sighing, the
eye-rolling, the grinning. I don't know if the vice president knew that
there was a camera on him the whole time, that there was a split
screen," senior Romney campaign adviser Russ Schriefer said. "Even if we
thought he was making good points, I think that they stepped on his
good points. He was trying to cram everything in that he could that
wasn't in the last debate to try and get it all out at once. But I don't
think he made any kind of coherent argument as to why the Obama-Biden
ticket should be re-elected."
Gergen agreed: "On style
I think that Paul Ryan won the debate. The Biden dismissive laughs, the
interruptions, the sort of shouting, I think that Ryan was calmer and
frankly more presidential."
What did debate watchers think? Seven out of 10 debate watchers in a CNN/ORC International poll said that Biden was the aggressor.
3. Does the debate even matter?
The short answer is no.
People don't vote for
vice presidents at the ballot box. They vote for presidents. Past vice
presidential debates, no matter how high the drama, have ultimately done
little to move the needle in modern elections.
Not surprisingly,
Biden's scenery-chewing performance was viewed differently by both
campaigns. The Romney campaign said he looked erratic, rude and
unhinged. The Obama campaign said he laid out the facts and made Ryan
look, in the spin room words of former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, "like a
lightweight."
But a common refrain
from both campaigns after the debate was that it will probably have a
minimal effect on the race one way or the other.The biggest impact of
the night, and the reason Democrats were ebullient after the debate, was
the base-rallying impact of Biden's aggressive and blustery stage
presence.
In the wake of Obama's
wilting flower routine in last week's debate, the full Biden,
exasperated and angry with Romney and Ryan, was just what Democrats
needed.
How happy was team
Obama? Campaign surrogates stayed in the spin room with puffed chests
for much longer than they did in Denver, when they offered dubious
messaging before escaping. The campaign immediately sent out a
fundraising plea. President Obama put himself in front of cameras after
landing at Andrews Air Force Base to praise Biden's performance.
And it wasn't just the Obama camp.Democratic state
parties, liberal interest groups and down-ballot campaigns rushed to
send out fundraising e-mails to capitalize on a fired-up base. You
didn't see much of the same on the Republican side.
The debate launched a
fresh news cycle that will put a temporary halt to the "Chicago in
disarray" storylines. Now the pressure is on President Obama to keep
that narrative going next week in New York.
4. Ryan rises to challenge
It was arguably Ryan's biggest task in the vice presidential debate.
As the running mate to
the Republican challenger, Ryan needed to convey that he's fit to serve
should something happen to the commander in chief, that he would be
acceptable to Americans as president.
Known as an expert on
economic and budget issues, early in the debate Ryan showed his smarts
on foreign policy. During a discussion on troop drawdowns in
Afghanistan, he explained how the seasonal changes affect the fighting
in Afghanistan."The mountain passes
fill in with snow. The Taliban and the terrorists and the Haqqani and
the Quetta Shura come over from Pakistan to fight our men and women.
When it fills in with snow, they can't do it. That's what we call
fighting seasons. In the warm months, fighting gets really high. In the
winter, it goes down," explained Ryan.
"And so when Adm. Mullen
and Gen. Petraeus came to Congress and said, if you pull these people
out before the fighting season ends, it puts people more at risk. That's
the problem."
"I think Ryan proved
himself unexpectedly competent on foreign policy," said Republican
strategist and CNN contributor Alex Castellanos, who worked for Romney's
2008 presidential bid. "I think Ryan met his test tonight. Ryan looked
very reasonable."As expected, the Obama campaign disagreed.
"I think Congressman
Ryan was out of his depth and showed clearly the ticket is not ready for
prime time on foreign policy, and I think that was a decisive
difference between the two sides," said Obama campaign manager Jim
Messina.
So what do debate watchers think? Did Ryan pass the competency test?
Six out of 10 debate watchers in the CNN/ORC poll conducted said that Ryan is qualified to be president.
5. Malarkey moves numbers
"Malarkey" is one of Biden's favorite Biden-isms.
He's been saying it for
decades, but not usually with the kind of gusto he showed on Thursday
before millions of prime time television viewers.Soon after the debate
began, when Ryan criticized the Obama administration's foreign policy,
Biden fired back: "With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey."
What does malarkey mean?
People apparently rushed
to their computers to find out. "Malarkey," it turns out, was the
third-most-searched debate-related term of the night on Google. It was
also trending on Twitter for a good chunk of time.
For the record: it's basically the Irish-American term for "nonsense."
According to Google, the
other top searches during the debate were "Biden," "conflating," "Who
is winning the debate" and "How old is Paul Ryan."
Culled: CNN
Edited: LII
No comments:
Post a Comment