Biden not only won over the audience, but he got under his opponent's skin. (photo: AP)
12 October 12
or the second time in as many presidential elections,
Joseph Biden got to debate a young, attractive Republican candidate who
was demonstrably less qualified to to be president than I am to be
chairman of the World Bank. Joseph Biden is a very lucky man. The Great
Political Matchmaker in the Sky keeps handing him people who are trying -
and failing - to fight above their weight class, and he keeps blowing
through what can now legitimately be called the Bum of the Quadrennium
Club.
There is a deeply held Beltway myth of Paul Ryan, Man
of Big Ideas, and it dies hard. But, if there is a just god in the
universe, on Thursday night, it died a bloody death, was hurled into a
pit, doused with quicklime, buried without ceremony, and the ground
above it salted and strewn with garlic so that it never rises again. On
foreign policy, Ryan occasionally rose, gasping, to the level of obvious
neophyte. (He was more lost in Afghanistan than the Russian army ever
was.) On domestic policy, his alleged wheelhouse, he was vague,
untruthful, and he walked right into a haymaker he should have seen
coming from a mile off, when he started bloviating about Biden's role in
the "failed" stimulus program, only to have Biden slap him around with
Ryan's own requests for stimulus money for his home district back in
Wisconsin. He also made it quite clear that a Romney-Ryan White House
will do everything it can to eliminate a woman's right to choose. This
should make for some fine television commercials over the next few
weeks.
(A brief note here about Martha Raddatz, who's an old
pal from our baby journo days in Boston. She did a fine job holding feet
to the fire until her last three questions. She asked the two men to
define their Catholicism only through the issue of abortion, which is
not only insulting, but also limited a more interesting line of inquiry,
given the open opposition of the Catholic bishops to the zombie-eyed
granny-starving that is the hallmark of Ryan's career. And that closing
if-you-were-a-tree question was simply embarrassing.)
Moreover, the battering that Biden gave Ryan brought
something into sharp relief that the Republican party has been fudging
ever since Romney put the zombie-eyed granny-starver on the ticket -
that, for his entire political career up to that point, on critical
economic issues, Paul Ryan was an extremist even by the standards of the
modern Republican party, which are considerably high indeed. He was for
full privatization of Social Security. He was for the absolute
elimination of the defined-benefit Medicare and Medicaid programs. Since
being selected, it has become clear that the Romney people have forced
him to soften these positions. (His stance on Medicare, for example, has
evolved from Kill It Now to Arrange for Its Slow Death Later.) On
Thursday night, Biden dragged out the old Paul Ryan - and, I would
argue, the real Paul Ryan - and put him on display, and he made the new
Paul Ryan own him. For one brief moment, he almost got Ryan to commit to
Social Security privatization again. You could hear the screams from
Romney headquarters all the way up the Charles to where I was watching.
Ryan got hit on the stimulus. He looked ridiculous
trying to defend his refusal to specify what "loopholes" he and Romney
plan to close to make the magic arithmetic in their tax plan work;
Raddatz treed him completely on the mortgage-interest deduction, on the
elimination of which neither Ryan nor his running mate will commit to a
position. He looked even more ridiculous when Biden started pounding him
on his career-long quest to end Medicare and throw old people onto the
tender mercies of large insurance companies. Biden kept saying
"vouchers" until Ryan, at one point, said, "It's not a voucher. A
voucher is a check you get in your mailbox."
Wait. So if Paul Ryan gets his way, and Medicare as we
know it gets eviscerated in favor of a pot full of offal on which Paul
Ryan has slapped a label reading "Medicare," and my inadequate
health-insurance allowance comes by e-mail, then it's not a "voucher"
because it wasn't a check I got in the mail? And this is the issue on
which Paul Ryan is supposed to be Genius on roller skates. This was
humiliating enough, but when they started talking about war and peace,
specifically in Afghanistan, Ryan looked like a toddler trying to cross
the Hindu Kush.
He stammered. He vanished into his syntax. He gave
Biden the chance to ask him if he preferred that American soldiers carry
the fighting in the worst parts of the country rather than Afghan
troops, a devastating comeback for which Ryan had no answer. He kept
rambling about maintaining the country's "credibility" until, if you
closed your eyes, he started to sound like Robert McNamara in 1965. And
when Raddatz asked him, deftly, what would be worse, another war in the
Middle East or Iran with a nuclear bomb, he leaped in precipitously with
the latter, while about 75 percent of the country, including the two
other people on stage with him, looked at Ryan as though he'd lost his
mind. He did, however, demonstrate a certain talent for pronouncing long
foreign words that his briefers had taught him on Tuesday. Also, he
explained winter.
For years, Paul Ryan has been the shining champion of
some really terrible ideas, and of a dystopian vision of the political
commonwealth in which the poor starve and the elderly die ghastly,
impoverished deaths, while all the essential elements of a permanent
American oligarchy were put in place. This has garnered him loving
notices from a lot of people who should have known better. The ideas he
could explain were bad enough, but the profound ignorance he displayed
on Thursday night on a number of important questions, including when and
where the United States might wind up going to war next, and his blithe
dismissal of any demand that he be specific about where he and his
running mate are planning to take the country generally, was so
positively terrifying that it calls into question Romney's judgment for
putting this unqualified greenhorn on the ticket at all.
Joe Biden
laughed at him? Of course, he did. The only other option was to hand him
a participation ribbon and take him to Burger King for lunch.
You know what's the difference between Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan?
Lipstick.
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