Rearguard Biden action lays ground for Obama offensive

OPINION:The vice-president didn't disappoint and exposed pretender Paul Ryan's tired neo-con agenda

NOW YOU know what Thanksgiving with my family is like.

A donnybrook with Irish Catholic uncles and nephews interrupting one another, mocking one another, arguing over one another, bombastically denouncing every political opinion except their own as malarkey. The loser of the vice-presidential debate was, of course, Barack Obama. In contrast to the pair on the undercard slugging it out, the president’s limp performance the other night was even more inexplicable and inexcusable. The president was no doubt warned not to sigh, but his entire demeanour was a sigh.

The fact that one diffident debate by the president could throw his whole race into crisis shows that nobody madly loves Obama anymore. With his aloof presidency, he shook off the deep attachments from 2008, and now his support lacks intensity.

Even if he comes out in the townhall debate tomorrow with Ben Affleck charm, he has a Mitt Romney problem. Will it be the real Obama or will he just be doing what the media suggest and the base demands? In Thursday night’s hockey game of a debate, the odd semiotics were not Gore-y sighs but grins. It’s hard to imagine a politician getting penalised for smiling too much, but Joe Biden managed it, breaking out in smiles and laughter 92 times by the count of ABC News. Ever since Obama tapped him, Biden has felt that his role is to warm up Barry’s Brother From Another Planet affect. In this debate, making up for his boss’s Spockiness was critically important, so Biden overcompensated with a volcano of verbosity and gesticulating.

Biden was trying to do what Romney did well: come across as a senior partner chastising a junior associate who screwed up. For this vice-president, though, less is never more. He mugged condescension as if he were the star of a silent movie. But who ever accused Uncle Joe of subtlety? Not Sarah Palin, who told Fox News that Biden reminded her of “watching a musk ox run across the tundra with somebody underfoot”. Still, in a political world where most leaders are so marketed and poll-tested that they show little temperament, why begrudge Joltin’ Joe an excess of it, especially when he’s confronted with such whoppers? Besides, he offered a tour de force on facts that brought the playing field to life again.

Ryan, who was a toddler when Biden first came to the Senate, seemed a little green and shaky at moments – not showing the goofy cockiness captured in Time’s photographs of his dumbbell workouts. Talking budget blarney, the tea party’s boywonder once more proved that he can come up with a number for any purpose.

Ryan explained Romney’s embarrassing secret tape to fat cats with this snide put-down to Joe, as he chummily called his elder: “I think the vice-president very well knows that sometimes the words don’t come out of your mouth the right way.” Biden shot back: “But I always say what I mean.”

If Obama needed Biden on the ticket to add a little humanity, Romney needed Ryan as “a modular conviction unit”, as one Obama adviser joked. Romney, a say-anything salesman used to buying whatever he wants, hired his ideology. Ryan is a true believer, and that’s a little awkward now that Romney is making strides by showing that he truly believes nothing – running away from, rather than towards, the hard-right stances that won him the nomination. “Convictions aren’t helpful at the moment, said Obama strategist David Axelrod. “The game right now is to try to obfuscate. Romney’s audacity in the debate was in hiding their plans. And Ryan actually believes this stuff. He argued for a social security privatisation plan so radical that even the Bush administration called it irresponsible.”

The 42-year-old Wisconsin congressman kept gulping water, and once, when Biden nailed Ryan for twice soliciting the stimulus money he condemns, he may have actually gulped. Unlike Palin, who also had to cram before her debate, Ryan did not need to memorise chunks. He tried to learn about the parts of the world he had never followed closely. On Afghanistan, he spouted so many obscure geographical references, from Zabul to Kunar to the treacherous eastern provinces, he sounded like Google maps.

Ryan had intensive coaching from Dan Senor, senior adviser, to debate Biden, the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But he still knew far less about the globe than Biden and moderator Martha Raddatz, ABC News’s senior foreign affairs correspondent.

Ryan ended up parroting Senor, who made his name as spokesman for the botched Iraq occupation. That’s a scary thing unless you want to go back to the messianic mind-set of imprinting our “values” in the Islamic world, an attitude that brought us interminable wars and trillion-dollar deficits.

Ryan echoed the bankrupt neo-con philosophy of going to war to prevent war. With Iran, he said, the best thing to do is threaten war. “The key is to do this peacefully,” he said, sounding as woolly as Paul Wolfowitz. Ryan didn’t seem to understand what much of the world does: the administration has worked with allies to strengthen sanctions, which have turned Iran into an economic basket case.

Biden also boxed Ryan into looking as though he wants to send more US troops to Afghanistan and to intervene in Syria, which isn’t so appealing to war-weary America. Ronald Reagan knew how to bluster for peace. Neo-cons do not. When they run the show, threatening a war is followed by going to war and that is followed by bollixing up the war and that is followed by our troops’ dying at war and money-pit nation-building to end the war. And that is followed by economic disaster for America.

Amped to make up for all of Obama’s missed shots, Biden went on a one-minute scream of consciousness about the 47 per cent cited by Romney as moochers, the 30 per cent cited by Ryan as takers, Scranton, his parents, the Buffett rule, social security, veterans, the 47 per cent again, Grover Norquist, the middle class, a fair shot, Wall Street v Main street, and $500 billion in additional tax cuts for 120,000 wealthy families. Practically in one breath. Whew!

Biden’s weakest moment was on Libya, where he he claimed the White House didn’t know about requests for more security for diplomats there. It is likely true that such an appeal never made it through the bureaucracy to the west wing. But Biden should have been prepared to answer questions about a blunder that has scuffed the administration’s national security lustre.

Certainly, secretary of state Hillary Clinton has been doing a good imitation of her predecessor James Baker in keeping a distance from trouble. On Friday, she finally spoke up. “Diplomacy, by its nature, has to often be practised in dangerous places,” she said.

The president’s advisers now realise they will need a much better explanation by tomorrow, when Romney is certain to press Obama on the issue. Mittens has been doing better with women since the first debate. Raddatz didn’t dwell on women’s issues, which denied Biden a chance to home in on Ryan’s chillingly retro positions. Ryan, who opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest, said: “The policy of a Romney administration will be to oppose abortion with the exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother.”

When Raddatz asked Ryan if those who believe abortion should remain legal should be worried if the Republican team wins, Ryan basically said yes.

“We don’t think that unelected judges should make this decision,” he said, though he and other Republicans for decades have pined for a Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v Wade. He added: “People, through their elected representatives and reaching a consensus in society through the democratic process, should make this determination.”

Biden, for once, wasn’t smiling. – (New York Times service)