It was a battle of smiles and smirks as Vice President Joe Biden and Rep. Paul Ryan debated each other on Thursday night. Both men were eager beavers — beavers showing their choppers repeatedly, in often pained grimaces, condescending smirks, or incredulous glances — trying strenuously to provide a contrast to the first Obama-Romney debate. The words that emerged from beneath those grins were often contentious, frequently interrupting each other. And except for one big misstep in phrasing an important question, moderator Martha Raddatz was satisfyingly assertive in refereeing the squabbles and keeping the debate moving at a pace that allowed for many positions to be challenged and for drama to unfold.
President Obama said earlier this week that he thought he’d been “too polite” in the first debate. No one will ever say that about Joe Biden in this one. Indeed, to the extent that TV debates are scored on the basis of images and projected moods, viewers are likely to be divided, because the aggressiveness of Biden — an aggressiveness that expressed itself as much in humor and mock-disbelief as in anger — will be off-putting to some (and thus lead to “Biden lost”) or seem like a refreshing directness to other viewers (thus leading to the opinion that “Biden won”). But what of Ryan? I think he wins or loses on the basis of the reflected mass-audience, mass-media judgment on Biden’s performance. Ryan obviously arrived ready to look like a calm moderate, but his own battery of facial expressions frequently conveyed qualities he probably didn’t intend, either: condescension, smugness, and — occasionally in the foreign policy area — blankness. In this sense, the debate was Biden’s to win or lose.
Post-debate analysis on cable news bears this out. On Fox News, Brit Hume said that the “smirking, laughing… mugging by the Vice President” was “rude.” On Fox, it was asserted that viewers would take away the image of “a cranky old man to some extent debating a polite young man.” By contrast, over on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow said she thought viewers would interpret Biden’s smiles as signaling to viewers, “this guy is lying.”
While neither debater could bring himself to use that word, “lie,” Biden came closest when he said that Ryan’s assaults on various aspects of Obama’s foreign policy were “a bunch of malarkey… not a single thing he said was true.” Biden asserted throughout the debate that many of Ryan’s claims were “inaccurate” and “all this loose talk” and used the phrase “a bunch of stuff,” which Raddatz asked him to define. The consensus by both men, who exchanged smiling glances at this, was that the Vice President was calling bull— on Rep. Ryan but everyone knew he couldn’t use that word.
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