Debate Deblogging

Joe Biden came out swinging in the Vice-Presidential Debate last night, and lord knows he needed to.  Paul Ryan held up for a while, but in the end he faltered under Biden's relentless fact checking.   Biden also scored some crushing blows yesterday.  The transcript, courtesy CNN, is pretty fascinating.

Biden's best attacks came early and often, especially during the foreign policy questions that moderator Martha Raddatz brought up at the beginning.  After Ryan went somewhere over Mars on the administration's response in Benghazi, Joe tore into Paul.

BIDEN: With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey.
RADDATZ: And why is that so?
BIDEN: Because not a single thing he said is accurate. First of all...
RADDATZ: Be specific.
BIDEN: I will be very specific. Number one, the - this lecture on embassy security - the congressman here cut embassy security in much for the embassy security piece.
Number two, Governor Romney, before he knew the facts, before he even knew that our ambassador was killed, he was out making a political statement which was panned by the media around the world. And this talk about this - this weakness. I - I don't understand what my friend's talking about here.

But Biden's response to Congressman Ryan's attacks on the stimulus package was the moment of the debates so far.

And I've never met two guys who're more down on America across
the board. We're told everything's going bad. There are 5.2 million
new jobs, private-sector jobs. We need more, but 5.2 million - if
they'd get out of the way, if they'd get out of the way and let us
pass the tax cut for the middle class, make it permanent, if they get
out of the way and pass the - pass the jobs bill, if they get out of
the way and let us allow 14 million people who are struggling to stay
in their homes because their mortgages are upside down, but they never
missed a mortgage payment, just get out of the way.

Stop talking about how you care about people. Show me something.
Show me a policy. Show me a policy where you take responsibility.

And, by the way, they talk about this Great Recession if it fell
out of the sky, like, "Oh, my goodness, where did it come from?" It
came from this man voting to put two wars on a credit card, to at the
same time put a prescription drug benefit on the credit card, a
trillion-dollar tax cut for the very wealthy. I was there. I voted
against them. I said, no, we can't afford that.

And now, all of a sudden, these guys are so seized with the
concern about the debt that they created. 

Just devastating stuff.  Ryan was simply outgunned.

Taegan Goddard at Political Wire starts the pundit roundup after the jump and the reviews are just as bad:

Ryan's goal was to build on Romney's strong performance last week and continue to reassure undecided voters. In the end, however, he found his toughest opponent wasn't Biden, it was his own record and the Romney campaign platform. He had trouble playing defense under Biden's withering attacks. Ryan was exceptionally weak on the proposed Romney tax plan -- "not mathematically possible", according to Biden -- while once again refusing to give specifics.

In terms of style, Ryan didn't take kindly to being interrupted. It was almost as if Biden was coached to interrupt him.

Biden was more prepared, more experienced and the clear winner.

Roger Simon at Politico:

Whatever Joe Biden was drinking Thursday night, Barack Obama ought to order a case of it.

Biden took on Paul Ryan in the one and only vice presidential debate and did what Obama had failed to do last week in his debate with Mitt Romney: Biden not only won over the audience, but got under his opponent’s skin.

Biden smirked, sneered, and openly laughed at many of Ryan’s responses. It could have looked rude, but Biden made it look tough.

After all, Biden was the 69-year-old defender and Ryan was the 42-year-old challenger. But by the end of the evening, Joltin’ Joe had done real damage to his opponent.

CNN's review:

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.

The NY Times editorial this morning was brutal:

Mr. Ryan’s performance on foreign affairs and military issues was at best disingenuous and at worst bumbling. He said he and Mr. Romney agreed with the administration’s planned 2014 pullout from Afghanistan but still thought it was a bad idea, a bizarre nonresponse that did little but confuse voters.

He never said what more a Romney administration would do about Syria than is already being done. And on Iran, he simply repeated Republican talking points about Mr. Obama’s “weakness” but did not say what Mr. Romney would do differently that would actually affect Iran’s nuclear program, apart from starting a war. He had no answer when the moderator asked how effective he thought military action be. 

Mr. Biden refused to ignore the condescending remarks that Mr. Ryan and Mr. Romney have made toward the least fortunate, regularly described by the Republican ticket as “takers” who are irresponsibly dependent on government. That attitude, he noted, is reflected in the Republican tax plan that favors the rich. In one of his most effective summaries, he said that if Republicans would just “get out of the way,” there might be real action on middle-class tax cuts, jobs bills and mortgage relief. 

“Stop talking about how you care about people,” he said. “Show me something.” Mr. Ryan’s predictable response: You said the stimulus would fix the entire economy and it didn’t. But he had no responsible answer for increasing growth.

ABC News correspondent Russell Goldman:

Online, viewers immediately responded to Biden's attitude, on Twitter "#bunchofstuff" quickly began trending as did the mock user @laughinJoeBiden. Republican operatives took to the internet to accuse the vice president of "smirking."

"I know you're under a lot of duress to make up for lost ground, but I think people would be better served if we don't interrupt each other," Ryan said at one point.

Biden was clearly on a mission to re-energize the Democratic base after Mitt Romney saw a bounce in the polls following last week's debate.

"Joe Biden won," said Matt Dowd, a Republican strategist and ABC News consultant. "He stopped the bleeding." 

CBS News' snap poll also found Biden the winner:

Fifty percent of uncommitted voters who tuned into Thursday night's vice presidential debate in Danville, Ky., said they see Vice President Joe Biden as the winner over Mitt Romney's GOP running mate Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., according to an instant poll taken by CBS News.


Of the 431 polled immediately following the debate, 31 percent deemed Ryan the winner, and 19 percent said they felt it was a tie. Party-wise it's a switch from last week's presidential debate, which uncommitted voters handed easily to Romney over President Obama.

Washington Post's Chris Cillizza thought Biden won it in the end, on Raddatz's final question about abortion.

Biden was measured, passionate and heartfelt when talking about abortion and why he thought he and President Obama deserved a second term. He made his points forcefully but without any or the sarcasm or the nasty edges that characterized his performance for the bulk of the debate. (More on that below.) The question for Biden (and Democrats): Were people still watching? And why didn’t he flash a little more of that trademark empathy earlier?

All in all, Joe Biden came through with flying colors.  He ended the Obama slide.  The question is will it move the needle back?  We'll see.