Analysis: Tonight’s debate is Joe Biden’s best chance to refute questions about his age and capacity — or to make them bigger dangers to his nomination
Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.He can make the “let’s get real” argument that sweeping progressive New Deal and Great Society policies have been enacted when Democrats held landslide majorities in Congress; that without such power, even less ambitious efforts, like the Affordable Care Act, face serious headwinds and can come at a political price.
When Biden first ran for president more than 30 years ago, a combination of missteps forced him out of the race a year before the campaign began. He never walked onto a debate stage. In 2008, he was out of the race a day after the Iowa caucuses; and through the 2007 campaign, he was a marginal figure, with a poll rating roughly equal to former Cleveland Mayor Dennis Kucinich.
You can get a better sense of Biden’s debate style by looking at the 2012 vice presidential debate with Paul Ryan. Coming just days after Obama’s zombie-like performance against Mitt Romney, the Full Biden was on display.wrote, “A high-energy performance—part angry bar-room debater, part condescending elder uncle, part comic mime artist—[that] frequently seemed to leave Paul Ryan overwhelmed.
Biden did effective work here, especially in rallying Democrats disheartened by Obama’s poor debate. But there’s a catch. This was a two-person debate with a flexible format permitting time to answer questions in some detail and a skilled moderator who knew how to guide a conversation. And since Biden was debating a Republican adversary, he was free to employ sarcasm, ridicule and an eyeball rolling response to Ryan..
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