Joe Biden, on the evening of Oct. 11, 2012, delivered the most extraordinary, most ambitious, and most undignified performance in the history of televised vice presidential debates.
Biden snickered and guffawed his way through the debate, interrupting his opponent repeatedly for the sake of interrupting, and firing irrelevant juvenile comebacks at his opponent’s sober points.
Surely, this boorishness would hurt Biden. Surely, laughing at dead servicemen in a war his administration started, and at the insolvency of entitlements, would look bad to the press and the public.
Or so I thought. I was wrong.
“Vice President Joe Biden dominated Thursday’s Vice Presidential debate,” wrote Ben Smith of Buzzfeed, “hammering Rep. Paul Ryan again and again during his portion of the night while his laughs, smirks, chuckles, cackles and hand-gestures overwhelmed Ryan’s more understated jabs.”
The smirks, cackles, and hand gestures that made Biden look like the blowhard at the end of the bar were precisely what the center-left media saw as Biden’s master touches — not because they thought Biden looked good, but because they made Ryan look bad.
“Joe Biden, hero of the truth,” declared one New York Daily News headline. “Biden was on the offensive and owned the conversation. I don’t think it was close,” declared Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. The Left’s wonks called it a victory for Biden. Democratic congressmen praised it as a “smackdown.”
Some polls suggested the pundits were right, that Biden won the debate.
My wife had predicted Biden’s victory ahead of time. Ryan’s not going to do well, she warned, because “most sane people can’t handle insane.”
Biden won the debate by becoming the Joker. That was when it became clear that President Donald Trump was possible.
After every 2016 Republican debate, I would comment to my wife and to my conservative colleagues, surely Trump’s boorishness, ignorance, and utter lack of dignity will look bad to voters. Yet after every debate, Trump rose in the polls.
Like Biden 2012, Trump 2016 would interrupt his opponents — not to make a point, but to interrupt, to establish his dominance over the likes of Jeb Bush. When an opponent lodged a perfectly valid criticism of Trump, Trump would respond with an irrelevant, often personal attack. His “counterpunching” was never about rebutting an attack, it was about inflicting maximum pain so as to make the opponent hesitate before punching the next time.
Biden made it clear that being a vulgar pest was a winning formula in American politics. So America was about to see vulgar pest-hood for real. If Biden was Jack Nicholson’s Joker, Trump would be Heath Ledger’s Joker.
Biden was the proto-Trump in many other ways besides the boorish debating. Biden, for instance, had a creepy habit of pawing at women and kissing them in the open, and somehow got away with it. Americans, it turned out, tolerate this creepy grabbing.
This made it a bit less shocking in 2016 when Donald Trump didn’t collapse in the polls after being caught bragging about how he kisses women he’s just met, and grabs their crotches, and “they let you do it.”
Biden peddled old racial stereotypes and somehow got away with it. “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent,” he said in 2008, before Obama chose him as a running mate.
[Also read: Joe Biden embraced segregation in 1975, claiming it was a matter of ‘black pride’]
Trump later got away with saying Muslims in New Jersey were celebrating on 9/11, and brushed off his lengthy stretch of insisting that Barack Obama wasn’t really born in America.
Biden also showed that a grasp of facts, or even a concern for them, was not a prerequisite for higher office. Biden called Africa a country, repeatedly referred to of America’s war in Iran, and would inflate death tolls a thousandfold. Trump does the same sort of thing with wild abandon.
Biden warmly embraced the most oppressive policy of an authoritarian regime, basically telling China that the U.S. doesn’t object to the one-child policy. The American press just let it go. This was a preview of Trump’s embrace of Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Now Joe Biden is considering a run for president. Some analysts used to think someone as boorish, handsy, fact-free, and warm towards tyranny as Biden couldn’t be president. Boy, were they wrong.
