EMAIL DETAILS

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/10/Why-Joe-Bidens-Laugh-is-the-Most-Devastating-Political-Weapon-of-the-2012-Election
Why Joe Biden’s Laugh is the Most Devastating Political Weapon of the
2012 Election
By Juli Weiner<http://www.vanityfair.com/content/vanityfair/contributors/juli-weiner.html>
9:31 AM, October 12 2012

Joe Biden is earning rave reviews for his electrifying performance in last
night’s vice-presidential debate. *Vanity Fair’*s own Todd Purdum
wrote that<http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/purdum/2012/10/joe-biden-wins-vice-presidential-debate>Biden
“was priest to Paul Ryan’s flummoxed altar boy, Scoutmaster to Ryan’s
nervous, tongue-tied knot-tier. His smile veered—yes—between amused and
condescending, depending on the honey or vinegar with which he referred to
Ryan as ‘my friend.’” But can you blame Ryan for being so off his game?
Self-satisfied smirking was sort of his Thing!

But the smirking was but a prelude to the snickering. Basically every time
that Ryan said something, about anything, Biden looked down and giggled to
himself, sometimes simultaneously scribbling down notes (“<-- hate u
paul”), sometimes not. *New York* magazine has a fine
summary<http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/10/bidens-laughter-delightful-or-disrespectful.html>of
the controversy surrounding the chuckle: “On Twitter Piers Morgan
deemed
Biden's laugh ‘infectious,’ and after weathering the last week many
liberals seemed happy to have something to smile about. Unsurprisingly,
right-leaning Tweeters weren’t amused by Biden’s suggestion that everything
Paul Ryan said in the debate was absurd.”

But this *particular* style of laughing—i.e., its specific aesthetic
qualities—was what made it so universally, perhaps even subconsciously,
persuasive. We think *New York* is correct that it *is* an implicit
suggestion “that everything Paul Ryan said in the debate was absurd,” but
the laugh was equal parts bemusement as it was conspiratorial. It was a
laugh that also implicitly suggested that the audience—the intelligent,
informed, rational, beautiful, amazing-taste-in-music-having, weight-losing
audience—was in on the joke. It was not an arrogant laugh; at no point did
Biden seem condescending to anyone but Paul Ryan. It makes sense that
Morgan called it “infectious.” Every laugh was an audience-participation
question: “Can you believe this guy?”
No one wants to say that he or she doesn’t get what’s so funny. Everyone
wants to be in on every joke. Human nature is as steady as Paul Ryan’s tie
is wide.


On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 8:41 AM, Alexander Snyder-Mackler <
smacklera@gmail.com> wrote:

> <http://www.politico.com>
>
> *Beau Biden defends smiling Joe*
> By: Katie Glueck
> October 12, 2012 08:31 AM EDT
>
> Beau Biden on Friday dismissed criticism of his father’s debate
> performance, saying that if the only thing Republicans can attack is the
> vice president’s smile then “you know you’ve landed punch after punch.”
>
> “[My] dad was up there, he was respectful, he was in command of the
> stage,” Beau Biden, Delaware’s attorney general, said Friday on CNN’s
> “Starting Point.” “Any time you’re being attacked for style points, you
> know you’ve landed punch after punch after punch after punch. I think
> that’s why, in the spin room last night, the only thing Republicans were
> talking about was my dad smiling too much. I’ll take that criticism any
> day.”
>
> Joe Biden smiled, laughed, and, some said<http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1012/82321.html>,
> smirked throughout the debate, generating chatter on Twitter<http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1012/82313.html?hp=r1>and among pundits after his face-off with GOP vice presidential hopeful
> Paul Ryan.
>
> “Any time the right is going after you on style points, you know you’ve
> won the argument,” Biden said.
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 8:37 AM, Molly Magarik <molly@beaubiden.com>wrote:
>
>> VP Debate 2012: The Real Paul Ryan Is Bad for America
>> By Charles P. Pierce<http://www.esquire.com/archives/blogs/politics/by_author/68/15;1>
>> at 12:43AM
>>
>> Read more:
>> http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/paul-ryan-debate-joe-biden-13626962#ixzz295UfwYeH
>>
>> *For the second time in as many presidential elections,* Joseph Biden
>> got to debate a young, attractive Republican candidate who was demonstrably
>> less qualified to to be president than I am to be chairman of the World
>> Bank. Joseph Biden is a very lucky man. The Great Political Matchmaker in
>> the Sky keeps handing him people who are trying — and failing — to fight
>> above their weight class, and he keeps blowing through what can now
>> legitimately be called the Bum of the Quadrennium Club.
>>
>> There is a deeply held Beltway myth of Paul Ryan, Man of Big Ideas, and
>> it dies hard. But, if there is a just god in the universe, on Thursday
>> night, it died a bloody death, was hurled into a pit, doused with
>> quicklime, buried without ceremony, and the ground above it salted and
>> strewn with garlic so that it never rises again. On foreign policy, Ryan
>> occasionally rose, gasping, to the level of obvious neophyte. (He was more
>> lost in Afghanistan than the Russian army ever was.) On domestic policy,
>> his alleged wheelhouse, he was vague, untruthful, and he walked right into
>> a haymaker he should have seen coming from a mile off, when he started
>> bloviating about Biden's role in the "failed" stimulus program, only to
>> have Biden slap him around with Ryan's own requests for stimulus money for
>> his home district back in Wisconsin. He also made it quite clear that a
>> Romney-Ryan White House will do everything it can to eliminate a woman's
>> right to choose. This should make for some fine television commercials over
>> the next few weeks.
>>
>> (A brief note here about Martha Raddatz, who's an old pal from our baby
>> journo days in Boston. She did a fine job holding feet to the fire until
>> her last three questions. She asked the two men to define their Catholicism
>> only through the issue of abortion, which is not only insulting, but also
>> limited a more interesting line of inquiry, given the open opposition of
>> the Catholic bishops to the zombie-eyed granny-starving that is the
>> hallmark of Ryan's career. And that closing if-you-were-a-tree question was
>> simply embarrassing.)
>>
>> Moreover, the battering that Biden gave Ryan brought something into sharp
>> relief that the Republican party has been fudging ever since Romney put the
>> zombie-eyed granny-starver on the ticket — that, for his entire political
>> career up to that point, on critical economic issues, Paul Ryan was an
>> extremist even by the standards of the modern Republican party, which are
>> considerably high indeed. He was for full privatization of Social Security.
>> He was for the absolute elimination of the defined-benefit Medicare and
>> Medicaid programs. Since being selected, it has become clear that the
>> Romney people have forced him to soften these positions. (His stance on
>> Medicare, for example, has evolved from Kill It Now to Arrange for Its Slow
>> Death Later.) On Thursday night, Biden dragged out the old Paul Ryan — and,
>> I would argue, the real Paul Ryan — and put him on display, and he made the
>> new Paul Ryan own him. For one brief moment, he almost got Ryan to commit
>> to Social Security privatization again. You could hear the screams from
>> Romney headquarters all the way up the Charles to where I was watching.
>>
>> Ryan got hit on the stimulus. He looked ridiculous trying to defend his
>> refusal to specify what "loopholes" he and Romney plan to close to make the
>> magic arithmetic in their tax plan work; Raddatz treed him completely on
>> the mortgage-interest deduction, on the elimination of which neither Ryan
>> nor his running mate will commit to a position. He looked even more
>> ridiculous when Biden started pounding him on his career-long quest to end
>> Medicare and throw old people onto the tender mercies of large insurance
>> companies. Biden kept saying "vouchers" until Ryan, at one point, said,
>> "It's not a voucher. A voucher is a check you get in your mailbox."
>>
>> Wait. So if Paul Ryan gets his way, and Medicare as we know it gets
>> eviscerated in favor of a pot full of offal on which Paul Ryan has slapped
>> a label reading "Medicare," and my inadequate health-insurance allowance
>> comes by e-mail, then it's not a "voucher" because it wasn't a check I got
>> in the mail? And this is the issue on which Paul Ryan is supposed to be
>> Genius on roller skates. This was humiliating enough, but when they started
>> talking about war and peace, specifically in Afghanistan, Ryan looked like
>> a toddler trying to cross the Hindu Kush.
>>
>> He stammered. He vanished into his syntax. He gave Biden the chance to
>> ask him if he preferred that American soldiers carry the fighting in the
>> worst parts of the country rather than Afghan troops, a devastating
>> comeback for which Ryan had no answer. He kept rambling about maintaining
>> the country's "credibility" until, if you closed your eyes, he started to
>> sound like Robert McNamara in 1965. And when Raddatz asked him, deftly,
>> what would be worse, another war in the Middle East or Iran with a nuclear
>> bomb, he leaped in precipitously with the latter, while about 75 percent of
>> the country, including the two other people on stage with him, looked at
>> Ryan as though he'd lost his mind. He did, however, demonstrate a certain
>> talent for pronouncing long foreign words that his briefers had taught him
>> on Tuesday. Also, he explained winter.
>>
>> For years, Paul Ryan has been the shining champion of some really
>> terrible ideas, and of a dystopian vision of the political commonwealth in
>> which the poor starve and the elderly die ghastly, impoverished deaths,
>> while all the essential elements of a permanent American oligarchy were put
>> in place. This has garnered him loving notices from a lot of people who
>> should have known better. The ideas he could explain were bad enough, but
>> the profound ignorance he displayed on Thursday night on a number of
>> important questions, including when and where the United States might wind
>> up going to war next, and his blithe dismissal of any demand that he be
>> specific about where he and his running mate are planning to take the
>> country generally, was so positively terrifying that it calls into question
>> Romney's judgment for putting this unqualified greenhorn on the ticket at
>> all. Joe Biden laughed at him? Of course, he did. The only other option was
>> to hand him a participation ribbon and take him to Burger King for lunch.
>>
>> You know what's the difference between Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan?
>>
>> Lipstick.
>>
>>
>
>
> --
>
> Alexander Snyder-Mackler
> (302) 598-8678
>


--
Molly Magarik
Political Director
(302) 377-2625
www.beaubiden.com
@beaubiden
www.facebook.com/beaubide