“Say What You Will About Biden . . .”

I confess that I have long understood, conceptually, the rap on Joe Biden: prolix, hair-plugged, imprecise, plagiaristic, gassy, and—in the case of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings 21 years ago this month—ludicrously (or lamentably) meandering.

To that indictment, I can only rejoin that in something close to 20 years of intermittent close observation or contact with him in Washington, he has always been serious, sober, curious, well staffed, well briefed, and superbly well informed. (And why not? He has been among the top 537 elected officials in the country since I was in seventh grade.)

So it made no sense to me to think that he would do anything other than his level best in last night’s debate at Centre College, in Danville, Kentucky. And within the opening minutes, it was clear that he had. He 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 in a mirror image of last week’s Mile High triumph for Mitt Romney, it was Ryan who kept his head down and looked to his notes. He is no dope, and he had his moments, and held his own against Biden’s relentless attack. But Ryan needed his notes, because he was on the ropes throughout.

Since disclosure and transparency are all the rage these days, let me reveal a few of my own biases:

1. President Obama’s performance last week was abysmal, as I have written, and each excuse his aides have given since only serves to underscore the limitations of personality and leadership that have dogged him throughout his term—and that keep his re-election an open question.
2. Martha Raddatz, the debate’s superbly effective moderator, is a treasured colleague. I first met her in Jerusalem in 2002, when I was covering Colin Powell for The New York Times, and just as we “embedded” bureaucratic scribblers took off for Galilee, Martha rushed on her own to a brutal bus bombing and came back calm and measured but also harrowed and hardened by the tragedy she’d witnessed.
3. I have interviewed Joe Biden more than once and am personally close to many of his current and former aides. No shared weddings, but many shared meals.
4. My wife and I had a wonderfully friendly conversation with Paul and Janna Ryan at the baggage-claim carousel at the Milwaukee Airport last Fourth of July weekend, and he proved his P90X bona fides by effortlessly hauling the luggage homeward.

All this being said, their debate included “a bunch of stuff,” as Biden put it at one point. Or as Ryan explained, when asked to define the term, “It’s Irish.” To which Biden rejoined that it was “malarkey.”

Malarkey there was. Ryan attacked the Obama administration for countenancing automatic cuts to defense spending that will take effect at year’s end without agreement on broader budget issues (cuts for which he himself once voted). In a lesser, but telling, error (pointed out by The New York Times’s peerless military reporter Eric Schmitt), he said that Marines should have been guarding the consulate in Libya, although Marines guard only embassies worldwide.

Ryan could not explain how his budget would add up. He was vulnerable to Biden’s charge that the Republicans act as if “this recession has come down from the sky” (instead of from deliberate choices that preceded Obama’s tenure) and that Ryan had voted to put “two wars on a credit card.” He did offer powerful testimony as to how his Catholic faith has influenced his view on abortion (though Biden responded with an equally thoughtful expression of his own views, and one that probably played better in a pluralistic society).

Ryan scored some debater’s points, by suggesting that since Obama was at some pains to run on his own record, he’d chosen to attack his rivals instead. But his closing statement was a mash-up of canned talking points from the Romney camp’s latest playlist—for instance, “This is not what a real recovery looks like,” in response to the news that unemployment is at last under 8 percent.

At one point, Biden declared, “I’ve had it up to here” with the Republicans’ fiscal fantasy (and Grover Norquist’s famous pledge requiring prospective candidates never to raise taxes). He noted, with relish, that Ryan had written him two letters requesting funds from the much-scorned Obama stimulus, to which Ryan all but seemed to gulp as he said, “On two occasions, we advocated for constituents.”

Will the debate change anything? Hard to say, but it might at least reset for a day or so the notion that the Romney-Ryan camp had been gaining the upper hand, or some kind of Big Mo. Biden wrestled the Romney-Ryan balloon to the ground. And the debate seems, at a minimum, to have been a replay of 2004 when Dick Cheney, for all his flaws, made John Edwards look even shallower than Edwards would later show himself to be. Obama should be grateful—not for the first time—that Biden is the fire to his ice.