More Vice Than Presidential: Biden’s Disrespect

So here’s a wild guess: someone during the debate preparation instructed Joe Biden to be aggressive, to be an attack dog. He apparently took quite literally Obama’s exculpatory explanation for his own crushing debate loss as due to an excess of politeness. And so he responded with a deluge of condescending obnoxiousness.

Here’s the problem with Biden’s shocking lack of nuance: there’s a yawning chasm between rhetorical aggression borne out of principled conviction and boorishness. FOX News anchor Chris Wallace called Biden’s misbehavior “unprecedented” and elaborated: “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a debate in which one participant was as openly disrespectful of the other as Biden was to Paul Ryan tonight. It was openly contemptuous and disrespectful.” CNN’s Gloria Borger concurred: “He was condescending at times to Paul Ryan. I think I could have done with a lot less eye-rolling and chuckling on the part of Joe Biden.” RNC chair Reince Priebus claimed that Biden interrupted Ryan 82 separate times during the debate. Brit Hume captured the limitations of Biden’s onslaught of discourtesy astutely:

“Well it all depends on what [undecided voters] think of Joe Biden and his demeanor. If you read the transcript you might well conclude that the Vice President had a very strong debate, that he had a lot to say, he was strongly critical of Governor Romney and his program, that he held his own. But that’s not all there is to it. We had the split screen, like we had during the Presidential debate. And what you saw while Paul Ryan was talking, as others have pointed out was smirking, laughing, smiling, mugging by the Vice President. My sense about it was that it was so compelling that people probably couldn’t take their eyes off it. So it will come down to whether people thought that was attractive or not. Myself, I didn’t. I thought it was rude and I have a feeling it will come across to a lot of people as rude. It looked like a cranky old man to some extent debating a polite young man.”

Even a preternaturally imperturbable Paul Ryan eventually commented on Biden’s over the top combativeness with a hint of sympathy: “I know you’re under a lot of duress to make up for lost ground.” In less charitable terms, he meant: “I know you’ve been given explicit instructions to act like a spoiled child.”

Biden’s performance was so over the top it was hard to carefully track the substance of the arguments. At every turn, he was garrulously laughing, or ostentatiously smiling, or rolling his eyes with adolescent annoyance. All in all, it was the performance of a petulant child, sighing histrionically and stamping his feet because Mom wouldn’t let him have cake for dinner. It was embarrassing to watch for anyone remotely familiar with what embarrassment means. It was difficult not to root for the elder statesman Biden to recover his senses and with them his dignity. I know I wanted him to rebound, to walk off that stage with some semblance of his self-respect intact.

I also want world peace and a truly delicious fat free donut.

Biden’s performance, or underperformance, was a stark reminder that seniority is a pale shadow of authentic gravity, that it is one thing to express stateliness and quite another to merely hit avuncular. Biden is older and more experienced than Ryan which only shines a harsher Klieg light upon his shocking lack of seriousness. It is hard to imagine, even for the most sympathetic viewer, how someone could spend a lifetime in the public eye and still lack even the most modest measure of rhetorical restraint. Despite his relative youth, Ryan seemed like a man in comparison to Biden’s boyishness. While Ryan seemed genuinely concerned for a nation in crisis Biden always seemed like he was on the verge of telling a bawdy joke, always on the precipice of letting slip something unsettlingly inappropriate.

In at least one sense, unlike vice presidential debates in general, this was a very significant electoral contest. Why? Because for all his proleptic talk about the arrival of the future here and now, Obama is a slightly reconstructed version of Biden: an old school liberal, clinging to empirically discredited policies, trying to win the grand battle of ideas with impatient and sighing demonstrations of his own intellectual grandeur. Biden is the perfect proxy for Obama: philosophically exhausted but convinced of his own aristocratic superiority. For both, that unfounded hubris expresses itself as cartoonish pretense.

Paradoxically, it is progressive liberals today who oppose progress, who stand athwart history yelling stop, who consistently strive to maintain the status quo. Biden is the perfect exemplar of this irony, purblindly screaming for a recalcitrant resistance to change while dishonestly calling that enlightened advancement. In place of new ideas, they have neatly packaged theatrical aggravation, condescendingly hoping their audience will be impressed.

Ryan is often referred to as pervasively “ideological” but that is a serious misnomer. Ideology is an faux intellectual flight from genuine wonder, from the experience of undogmatically trying to devise a theory that accommodates unvarnished reality. Ryan is driven by the purpose of principled conviction, not blinkered hypothesis assumed to be empirical fact. He is emboldened by firm intellectual foundations but also chastened by genuine humility. He is confident enough in his own ideas, and in Americans’ ability to grasp them, that he can talk to them like a grown up talks to another grown up, not like a second rate teacher talks to a third rate pupil. It has now become clear that the most serious vulnerability Obama/Biden has as a ticket is the bottomless disrespect for the people they purportedly represent. Ryan wins the debate tonight on this one singular ground: he talked to his future constituents like peers, instead of posturing for them like an aging child.

Category: Election 2012, Featured