PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● Shot: Here it is: The tweet of the day.
—Not the Bee, yesterday.
● Chaser:
At the school bus stop this morning my neighbor gave the best summation of the debate I’ve heard so far. Referring to VP Joe Biden’s rude-a-thon, he said: “At church dinners, I’ve sat a table away from that guy a hundred times. He’s the guy everyone wants to get away from.” Precisely so.
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The sheer jerkiness of the man certainly comes through. But there is an issue going beyond Biden’s abject rudeness (which according to snap polls and focus groups last night went over like a lead balloon with actual voters).
David Brooks, a good barometer of moderate thinking, put it this way: “This is not just an issue of manners. It is: How are we going to practice the kind of politics that will help us avert the so-called fiscal cliff? How are we going to balance the crosscutting challenges, like increasing growth while reducing long-term debt? A lot of people will look at Biden’s performance and see a style of politics that makes complex trade-offs impossible. The people who think this way swing general elections.”
Moreover, the obvious contempt with which both halves of the Democratic ticket hold their opponents (Obama couldn’t even look Mitt Romney in the eye) reinforces the impression that Obama can’t get along with political opponents. The president’s complete inability to work with Congress (as Bob Woodward detailed in “The Price of Politics”) and his hyper-partisanship have characterized his four years in office. This is not only a repudiation of his post-partisan appeal, but a formula for gridlock and ongoing acrimony. This is what many voters despise about politics.
The contrast between Obama-Biden and Romney-Ryan could not be greater, and the independent voters who despise partisan bickering now have a vivid portrayal of two very different approaches to governing.
—“Biden loses his cool, Dems lose independents,” Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post, October 12, 2012.