NOW you know what Thanksgiving with my family is like.
A donnybrook with Irish Catholic uncles and nephews interrupting one another, mocking one another, arguing over one another, bombastically denouncing every political opinion except their own as malarkey.
The loser of the vice-presidential debate was, of course, Barack Obama. In contrast to the pair on the undercard slugging it out, the president's limp performance the other night was even more inexplicable and inexcusable. The president was no doubt warned not to sigh, but his entire demeanor was a sigh.
The fact that one diffident debate by the president could throw his whole race into crisis shows that nobody madly loves Obama anymore. With his aloof presidency, he shook off the deep attachments from 2008, and now his support lacks intensity.
Even if he comes out in the town-hall debate on Tuesday with Ben Affleck charm, he has a Mitt Romney problem. Will it be the real Obama or will he just be doing what the media suggest and the base demands?
In Thursday night's hockey game of a debate, the odd semiotics were not Gore-y sighs but grins. It's hard to imagine a politician getting penalized for smiling too much, but Joe Biden managed it, breaking out in smiles and laughter 92 times by the count of ABC News. Ever since Obama tapped him, Biden has felt that his role is to warm up Barry's Brother From Another Planet affect. In this debate, making up for his boss's Spockiness was critically important, so Biden overcompensated with a volcano of verbosity and gesticulating.
Biden was trying to do what Romney did well: come across as a senior partner chastising a junior associate who screwed up. For this vice president, though, less is never more. He mugged condescension as if he were the star of a silent movie. But who ever accused Uncle Joe of subtlety?
Not Sarah Palin, who told Fox News that Biden reminded her of "watching a musk ox run across the tundra with somebody underfoot."
Still, in a political world where most leaders are so marketed and poll-tested that they show little temperament, why begrudge Joltin' Joe an excess of it — especially when he's confronted with such whoppers? Besides, he offered a tour de force on facts that brought the playing field to life again.
Ryan, who was a toddler when Biden first came to the Senate, seemed a little green and shaky at moments — not showing the goofy cockiness captured in Time's photos of his dumbbell workouts. Talking budget blarney, the Tea Party's boy wonder once more proved that he can come up with a number for any purpose.
Ryan explained Romney's embarrassing secret tape to fat cats with this snide put-down to Joe, as he chummily called his elder: "I think the vice president very well knows that sometimes the words don't come out of your mouth the right way."
Biden shot back: "But I always say what I mean."
If Obama needed Biden on the ticket to add a little humanity, Romney needed Ryan as "a modular conviction unit," as one Obama adviser joked. Romney, a say-anything salesman used to buying whatever he wants, hired his ideology.
Ryan is a true believer, and that's a little awkward now that Romney is making strides by showing that he truly believes nothing — running away from, rather than toward, the hard-right stances that won him the nomination.
"Convictions aren't helpful at the moment," said David Axelrod, the Obama strategist. "The game right now is to try to obfuscate. Romney's audacity in the debate was in hiding their plans. And Ryan actually believes this stuff. He argued for a Social Security privatization plan so radical that even the Bush administration called it irresponsible."
The 42-year-old Wisconsin congressman kept gulping water, and once, when Biden nailed Ryan for twice soliciting the very stimulus money he condemns, he may have actually gulped. Unlike Palin, who also had to cram before her debate, Ryan did not need to memorize chunks. He actually tried to learn about all the parts of the world he had never followed closely. On Afghanistan, he spouted so many obscure geographical references, from Zabul to Kunar to the treacherous eastern provinces, he sounded like Google maps.
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