Curmudgeon's Corner
cur-mud-geon: anyone who hates hypocrisy and pretense and has the temerity to say so; anyone with the habit of pointing out unpleasant facts in an engaging and humorous manner
Winners & Losers...
The performance by the sitting Vice President and the contender featured smirks, laughs, grimaces, and general condescension coupled with frequent attempts to interrupt his opponent. All this came from the sitting Vice President. The junior person in this debate, both by age and experience, Congressman Paul Ryan, was by far and away behaving as the adult in the room. Ryan was respectful even as he disagreed.
Partisans almost always find their favored person to have been the victor in any of these ‘debates’. The rare exception occurred in the first debate between the President and Mitt Romney; Romney came away as the clear winner and the people who will vote seem to have seen that quite clearly. Even most of those whose job was ‘spinning’ after the fact had to admit that.
CNN showed a ‘snap poll’ indicating that Ryan ‘won’ 48 to 40 over Biden, and CNN is not known as a conservative support group.
I have to wonder if the coached performance of Mr. Biden will prove to have been the most important part of the debate, even more important than any substance that existed. Will the outright condescension and facial contortions take their toll?
Biden probably played well with those who are simply angry about anything and everything Republican, sometimes in spite of the position of one party or the other. I suspect, however, that his performance turned off those who are still ‘undecided’. These are likely to be people who do not have strong party affiliations, or at least profess to not have those ties. These may also be people who are more sensitive to such theatrics, to the lack of what many would think to be simple politeness.
I may be quite naïve and I certainly wanted to see Ryan do well. I do not respond at all well to the bullying and disruptive tactics that were employed by Biden. I know that Biden had been told much rode on his performance and I know that he is adept at political altercations, but I thought it overdone to the point of distracting from whatever the message was that he tried to get across to the viewers who might still be making up their minds.
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