So it turned out to be hippie versus hipster, Grateful Dead versus Pink Martini, Donald Duck against Simba the Lion Prince. Thursday night's debate between vice presidential candidates Joe Biden and Paul Ryan wasn't just about the quarrel between two different visions of how to take our country into the still-new century, it was about two different eras in the history of the American family.
Vice President Biden, of course, has been in the Senate since 1973, a time when most Americans—especially those of Irish ancestry—lived stacked up in tiny tenement apartments in Boston, New York, and Chicago, and communicated by screaming at each other across the back alleys, window to window. Every throb in his voice, every exaggerated gesture left us practically smelling the cabbage left overlong on the stove and the cigar in the bathroom where Dad lingered for an hour on Sunday mornings with his funnies and sports section.
That was a time when there were still different cultures in America, when you could still see people speaking Polish or Spanish or Chinese in public, shopping for ingredients for their strange native foods, before television began making us all the same, except for the illegals. People were larger than life and therefore much closer together, and they displayed their emotions nakedly, whacking you insensible with a rolling pin and then weeping as they cradled you in their arms afterwards, if you were seriously injured. It was the same in the Senate, where New Deal Democrats like Edward Kennedy and Strom Thurmond ruled, bending the mobs to their will with their passionate oratory.
This was what Biden supplied on Thursday night at the virtuoso level, alternating between despair and hysteria like Lucia di Lammermoor in the last act, and it unsurprisingly had different effects on different people. Democrats loved it, of course. But a lot of people who email me, and not just Republicans, wanted to punch him in the nose.
What do independents want? Not someone who treats a fellow candidate for the vice presidency as if he were a stubbornly childish serial liar. (It's quite different when Willard Mitt Romney or his boys treat Barack Obama as an obstinate fibbing child, because they have the birth and breeding to bring it off—ed.) They want somebody who will stop this train from rolling off the fiscal cliff, and you can't do that if you don't even have acceptable manners.
Biden's style—openly laughing at Paul Ryan's mathematics, which is especially hurtful when you realize that mathematics is one of Ryan's proudest achievements (along with catfish noodling and having held a non-government job while he was in high school, before Ayn Rand inspired him to fix his lips around that inexhaustible nipple where he has hung ever since—ed.)—Biden's style harks back to an old-fashioned politics that will never be able to balance crosscutting challenges like the need to raise revenue against the need to lower taxes.
Ryan comes from a different era, where young people grew up in the suburbs and then got sucked up out of college into the meritocracy, where an ambitious lad quickly learns being abrasive won't get him anywhere, especially with people whose test scores are as good as your own. Moreover, he was nurtured by the conservative policy apparatus, which made him more comfortable talking about numbers than feelings.
In this generation, cool media have replaced hot media, gyms have replaced bars, and instead of wearing your heart on your sleeve you tattoo one on your biceps. Members look askance at emotionalism (which is why they would never tell stories about sonograming their fetal Bean, or how Mitt Romney might pay for all your kids to go to college if some of them get paralyzed and you're a Mormon—ed.), because they are cool, like Barack Obama. No, us mustn't say that, Preciouss won't like it...
Ryan showed himself to be amazingly fluent in areas he knows nothing about, like foreign policy, brilliantly called out Obama's economic failings, I think, though I was in the bathroom for a lot of that, and convinced me that Obama was responsible for something very bad happening in Libya, even if I'm not quite sure how.
Emotionally, Biden dominated the debate, and Democrats don't need to worry that they have lost any of the pure, irrational populist rage that fuels them, in spite of Obama's flaccid performance of last week. But it was the Romney-Ryan proposals that dominated in content, I guess because Obama doesn't actually have any proposals (other than on jobs, taxes, health care, education, women, seniors, international trade, finance industry reform, the environment, the military, foreign relations, and techie stuff like that).
It was a battle of generations. Biden had the virility on his side, along with additional body fat, but that's just weird.
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