VP Debate Reaction

Biden needed to stop the bleeding.

Ryan needed to be competent.

Did either succeed?  Lets get right to it....

Ryan wins on style.

When the economy is horrible people evaluate a contender to be reassured that they're capable of replacing the incumbent.  They're looking for a reason to jump from the incumbent but need to be comfortable making that jump.  In that regard Romney set the ball, and Ryan spiked it.  He looked presidential.  He listened to Biden, was political in his answers, and held his ground.  He didn't need to wipe the floor with Biden.  He didn't need to make Biden admit his own failings on every issue.  He just needed to hold his ground and convince people he isn't a weak link, and he won in that regard.

Biden lost on style because he came off worse than Gore in 2000, if that's possible.  The media won't want to focus on it out of their desire to avoid handing the Obama administration its second 'loss' in as many debates, but judging by the amount of news time Gore's smirk got in 2000, Biden's grins, guffaws, and sighs should generate significant reaction.  It isn't an exaggeration to say that every time Ryan spoke the camera caught Biden laughing, smirking, reacting confused, shaking his head, or any other type of incredulous reaction you can think of.  I imagine his base loved it, but I'm not sure how the rest of Americans received that performance.  Contrast his tendency to interrupt Ryan and call him a liar with Ryan's generally emotionally even performance, and you might have a recipe independents won't be able to choke down.

Biden wins on controlling the flow of the debate.

Biden knew he had to be aggressive.  Ryan knew Biden had to be aggressive (and even said so during the debate, quipping "I know you're under a lot of pressure").  According to some counts I saw, Biden interrupted Ryan 82 times!  Eighty-two times!!!  If you're doing that you're controlling the flow.  You'll lose some style points (see above), but you're definitely controlling the pace of the debate.

Ryan got side-tracked too often.  Biden's answers would list 8 different points (not always related to the topic at hand) and Ryan would address all of them in his response.  Often he seemed to get so side-tracked he forgot to answer the original question.  This happened during his reply to the question about the soldier upset with the tone of American politics.  I really don't think Ryan actually answered that.  Instead, he jumped into a litany of Obama missteps in foreign policy.  Not sure how that played off with independents, but it definitely played into Biden's hand.

Neither won on substance.

I'm conservative so I obviously agree with Ryan's position about generating taxes through broadening the tax base, but I can't award him any points on that because he didn't explain it well.  Instead he let the moderator imply he wasn't actually answering the question.  The Moderator's bias was exposed during this tax discussion.  The conservative position is to broaden the tax base by reducing taxes for all and through closing loopholes, which would be done via negotiation with the Dems.  But Raddatz kept pressing for more and more details, which loopholes specifically.  Obviously she wasn't understanding his position of 'Negotiate with the Dems'.  See, Liberals don't understand 'broadening the tax base'.  If a conservative were moderating, they'd have understood Ryan's response.  But that wasn't the case here, so Ryan needed to do a better job explaining it so Raddatz would get off his back.  He didn't rise to the occasion, and came off looking like he was avoiding the issue.  And that's just not the case.

Biden was quoting everything six ways from Sunday, but if you noticed he was mostly quoting Romney/Ryan positions.  That's because substantively it is difficult to defend 7.8% unemployment, $16 Trillion in debt, no plan to grow the economy, and a foreign policy that is failing before our eyes.  So most of the night he stayed on the offensive.  Rather than describing why Obama/Biden deserves another go around, he was trying to explain why Romney/Ryan doesn't even deserve a shot.  In that regard he missed his opportunity to convert voters and bring them back to Obama/Biden.  In a down economy the incumbent needs to convince voters that they deserve four more years, and you can't do that by spending all your time attacking someone who doesn't even have a record yet.

And the winner is....

The American people, who have one less debate to watch.

In all seriousness, it's about as close to a draw as I could imagine.  I would say Biden won because he obvioulsy controlled the debate, but he hurt himself by becoming emotionally unhinged.  I'm sure his base was energized quite a bit, because they too would want to yell at Ryan if they were debating him.  But if I'm independent and I'm analyzing this thing, do I really want to see one side getting angry, petulant, and disrespectful?  I can't imagine that helped him.

In the end Biden did what Biden needed to do: he injected life into the Obama campaign.  He avoided defending the Obama/Biden ticket, but he might have stopped the mass exodus of voters from the Obama ticket by effectively putting Ryan on the defensive all night.  Ryan did what Ryan needed to do by standing on his own two feet.  He is obviously presidential, he can carry himself well, control his emotions and is well versed on the issues.  Based on this performance, voters can see him as the Vice President.

The real question for me is what will the media latch on to?  Will they focus on Biden controlling the pace, or will that move backfire with the media focusing on Biden's obvious disdain for Romney/Ryan?  Which 'facts' will the media decide to expose?  Only God knows.  I'm sure MSNBC is reporting that Biden won hands down, and I'm sure Chris Matthews is already getting back that tingle in his leg.  Hannity over on FoxNews is probably giddy with all the Biden sighs and looks of exasperation that I'm sure he's compiling them into a nice little 30 second bit as we speak (Biden quipping "I always say what I mean" means we're going to hear all his gaffes re-lived over the next week, such as "You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.... I'm not joking").

I wish it were more definitive, but all in all I don't think this debate will cause an exodus of voters to one camp or the other.  Which is probably what we should expect from a VP debate in the first place.