A man debated a boy Thursday night on national television, and both were ultimately schooled by a woman.
Both males are auditioning for the vice presidency. Based on their performances — not their policies — only Vice President Joe Biden acted as though he could sit at the desk in the Oval Office and have his feet touch the ground. Moderator Martha Raddatz, a journalist who’s more accustomed to flying in a Black Hawk than sitting at an anchor’s desk, pursued each man with the vigor of a woman more accustomed to need-ling foreign leaders than reciting prompter text.
Caricature is the currency of media and politics, and this election year, both the sitting vice president and the aspiring vice president have inflated their cartoonishness by Greece-like percentages. Consider Time magazine’s newly released photos of Rep. Paul Ryan in gym clothes and backward baseball cap, curling dumbbells. Consider the photo of Biden nuzzling a doo-ragged biker chick last month in Ohio. Ryan portrays himself as a wonk who exercises his mind by crunching numbers and his body by numbering crunches. Biden, pairing foreign-policy credentials with rambling folksiness, has fashioned himself into a blue-collar elder statesman who sometimes acts like your uncle after three glasses of Scotch.
Biden, perhaps the last pre-Boomer on a major-party ticket, turns 70 next month. Ryan, the first bona-fide Gen-Xer on a major-party ticket, exited his terrible twos about three weeks after Biden became a senator.