Win or lose, Ryan did what he needed to do. Paul Ryan did well in every aspect and proved beyond a doubt he is presidential material. Hundreds of millions have been spent trying to paint him and Romney as rightwing radicals, but in the last 2 debates they have shown the American people that they are nothing like that, thus the surge in the polls.

I just don’t see how this debate helped Obama, but it will be interesting to see the effect in the polls.

And “style” cuts both ways – in some ways, the Veep’s style was a positive, at other times a negative. At other times, it’s not clear-cut, like his emphatic tone in delivering outrageous lies – if you didn’t bother to check the facts, you might be impressed by his passionate claims, for example, that the deficit was caused by spending on two wars and Medicare Part D, which he claimed to vote against – except he voted for the use of force in those wars and has been proud of his attempts to expand Medicare Part D. And not a word about his administration’s role in running up the deficit to over $16T, which was the question at-hand.

He told lie after lie, yet because he told those lies with such such verve, some claim he “won.”

If that’s what impresses you in a leader, the ability to tell outrageous lies in an outraged way, then Biden’s your man.

http://thebulletproofmonk.blogspot.com/2012/10/bidens-comprehension-skills-are-rusty.html

This close to an election people tend to see pretty much everything through a very partisan lens. If a person puts down the partisan lens through which they view these things and truly attempts to arrive at an objective answer to that question it is absolutely clear what that answer is.

Yes. Biden helped Obama quite a lot. Period.

You want confirmation of that? The Republican press is obsessing on “style”. Biden laughed and smiled too much during Ryan’s answers. The VP was “disrespectful”. The fact that this is what they are obsessing on tells you pretty clearly that the Republican press knows that Biden came out on top in this one.

It’s hardly likely that the election will turn on the VP debate, but Biden won the thing. Anyone but those who lack the ability to step back and view it through anything other than the eyes of a Republican partisan can see that.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/oct/10/despite-obama-attending-her-wedding-raddatz-ready-/

But there were a couple of times when she persistently talked over Ryan’s responses, after he had politely waited his turn to respond. I’m not sure what she thought she was doing, but it was rude and terribly unfair. And curiously, she never asked the VP to refrain from his snorts and sotto voce comments (honestly, I felt that Ryan should’ve stopped and requested the VP to act with the dignity and decorum the occasion called for.)

For these failures, her performance, then, earns a grade of “C”-.

In any case, with all those debates going back to 1960, this was absolutely the first time in which both Mrs. W. and I were yelling at the radio — specifically at Martha Raddatz for (1) not smacking down Biden for his constant interruptions of Ryan’s responses and (2) injecting herself too much into the discussion when Ryan was speaking. From a radio perspective, it seemed to us that Raddatz had a large share of the blame; but, after, watching it on TV, it appeared as if Raddatz herself might have been puzzled about how to handle the startling lack of class and debating etiquette being demonstrated by Biden.

In any case, Biden was, in our opinion, an all around disgusting putz. And, if Ryan did not have enough substance in some of his replies, perhaps that was in part because he kept getting interrupted by Biden and Raddatz. Those times when we were yelling loudest at the radio were when we were trying to hear what Ryan was saying and kept losing the thread in the Biden-Raddatz interference.

Biden certainly fired up his base, who are uninformed nut jobs. I expect he also did a REVERSE firing up of the opposite base and some independents as well.

Biden went off his sugar high about 3/4 way into the debate, the flailing stopped and he almost zoned out a couple times. I honestly thought there was something physically wrong with him, then at the end he jumped up and grabbed Ryan’s mother in death grip and grinned at her like a loon.

The whole thing was bizarre.