Biden’s Strategy: Be a Jerk

By Selwyn Duke —— Bio and Archives October 12, 2012

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Is there a human being on this Earth more obnoxious than Joe Biden? It appears that the following was his strategy in the vice-presidential debate:

Okay, I’ll smile wide like a used-car salesman, shake my head and laugh while Paul Ryan is talking. This will give all watching the idea that everything he says is nonsense. The only other option is to actually support my side with real ideas, sound reasoning and appeals to virtue. I can’t do that! The other thing I need to do is make myself look assertive, like a real alpha male, by interrupting my opponent continuously. Hey, then if TOTUS and I lose the election, anyway, I may still be able to take a leaf out of Bob Dole’s book and do commercials for male enhancement—of course, in my case it would be testosterone booster.

You know, as is so often the case in these debates, the arguments in the VP contest were a bit policy wonkish. So most viewers probably couldn’t know exactly what was true and what wasn’t. Given this, will the electorate’s judgment as to who won come down to likeability? If so, I can’t imagine that undecided voters wouldn’t have found Biden disrespectful and his personality thoroughly unappealing. If Barack Obama’s problem in Denver was bad altitude, Biden’s was bad attitude. So while we’ll have to see what polls tell us, I myself just had the strongest urge to wipe his obnoxious smile off his face with a scouring pad and harsh detergent.