Biden ackward, bizzare... but gets the job done

The Biden-Ryan debate might have been a strange farce if the presidency and the future of The Supreme Court didn't clearly hang in the balance. It was an unusual debate that reflected the various memes and emotions prevalent in this election... particularly on the relative left of the nation, a geography I've come to share and hope I can, in a sense, speak for here. The more educated among us didn't feel Obama "lost" the first debate in an intellectual sense... we know the facts when Obama alludes to them as well as when Romney ignores them and rattles off statistics that are... just not factual. For example, a low-information voter might be impressed to hear that "23 million Americans are unemployed" but 23 million Americans are not unemployed... this figure counts all those working part-time jobs, a high percentage of whom support themselves quite adequately. Many of Romney's desperate unemployed are riding around in Lexuses... distinctly upper-middle retirees such as my parents are included in that number. Indeed, we just don't get Romney's misty-eyed, low-information style; It makes us want to look at an entertaining podium or burst out laughing.

That said, Biden's laughter the other night was overdone and to discerning eyes, it showed for what it was... a political act, an offering to our demand of an avenging show of contempt for the Romney campaign. Fortunately, when Biden wasn't laughing in a strange manner, he was talking in a sure-footed, generally effective manner... switching between sound policy discussion to a sincere, powerful populist tone. He spoke in a way that appealed to the more educated, to lunch-pail Democrats, to the middle-of-the-road, to seniors, to the young. His references to the 47-percent were slightly forced and ever so slightly lacking in passion, but at least he made them... that video is so devastating that virtually any reference will do. The most victorious moments for Obama's side were products of reality more than style... Ryan claims that the stimulus didn't create jobs yet he asked for stimulus money to create Wisconsin jobs, in his own words. Then there was the moment when Ryan talked about the rising unemployment rate in Scranton and went on to say this was how it was going all around the country... Biden struck at the presented bare breast by pointing out the obvious fact that the headlines clearly show other-wise.

And then there's the question of abortion... it speaks well of Paul Ryan(if it's possible to speak well of Paul Ryan) that he came out with his anti-abortion view, but it's a huge political loser. On a side-note, I hate surgical abortion; There's something about it that just epitomizes unnatural high-tech ugliness. But this is politics and this is America: materialistic suburban voters want more jobs and they might consider selling out the poor, sick, and disabled... but there's no way in heck they want Roe vs. Wade overturned, and the fact that that's the Republican position is a red flag for them.

Anyway, put in its total context, Biden's performance was what the Democrats needed. Even before the veep debate, the poll numbers in the battle-ground states told a little-heard story about a resilient Obama lead. But there was a powerful story-line in the media(more or less across the political spectrum,) that Romney's debate "victory" had transformed the race... basically that it was all over and we'd better get used to the idea of him in our living rooms for the next four years. Thus, Biden's performance, uncivil and bizzare as it was... it got a tough job done at a critical moment, sort of like an ugly baseball hit... barely inside the line, one player out, one run... that's what victory looks like in the unseemgly sport of American politics in a game as tight and fiercely contested as this one.