Joe Biden’s histrionic performance last night, consisting of mugging, smirking, sneering, laughing, muttering No!, interrupting, and continually visually manifesting condescension, contempt, and his disagreement with, and dissent from, Paul Ryan’s statements and position in the debate has provoked much criticism and, most interestingly, comparison with another Vice President, Al Gore’s, disastrous debate performance in 2000.
Toby Harnden, of Britain’s Daily Mail, was one of many viewers who detected the presence of a ghost.
[The] Ghost of an over-confident Al Gore will haunt smirking Vice President Joe Biden who tried too hard to make up for his boss’ weakness . . . and was caught fibbing about the U.S. intelligence community.
Joe Biden came out swinging at Paul Ryan, flailing wildly and landing a few punches on his own jaw as well as his opponent’s.
He showed the kind of spirit and populist anger that President Barack Obama was so conspicuously lacking and has cheered up many demoralised Democrats.
But Biden’s performance here in Danville, Kentucky was both comical and self-defeating. Just as Al Gore sighed and rolled his eyes in 2000, so Biden smirked and guffawed.
His brief was to show the aggression that Obama so obviously lacked when the President went up against Mitt Romney last week. But as the dust settles today many will be left feeling that he went too far, tried too hard.
Many women and swing voters will have hated his condescending, swaggering display.
Perhaps the even bigger problem the Obama campaign will have in the coming days is that Biden, again just like Gore in 2000, repeatedly exaggerated and mischaracterised for effect.
And worse than Gore – who was caught in a series of small lies in 2000 – Biden was demonstrably untruthful in some big respects.
————————————
The RNC has already produced a campaign ad devoted to Biden’s derisive laughing. But the Daily Mail video clip was longer:
————————————
The comparison with Al Gore’s smirking in the 2000 presidential debate with George W. Bush occurred to me as well, and I was sitting here wondering why it is that experienced professional politicians would make such an obvious blunder as to over-act so much during a debate that they injured their own performances and credibility. How could they both be so naive? I asked myself. Where does this impulse to so much dramaturgy come from?
And, as I thought about it, it came to me. They are lying. They know that they are lying, and they are internally ill-at-ease because they know that they have nothing to offer but hot air. They are overacting because they are trying so hard to pretend, to pretend that it is all for real, that they believe in what they are saying. But they don’t actually, in their heart of hearts, really believe in the lines of guff that they are spinning, so they huff and they puff and they make faces at their opponents, desperately trying to persuade the audience of viewers to share their contemptuous dismissal of their miserable and unworthy opponents who dare to challenge the great and magnificent Oz!
To pull this kind of thing off, you have to be incredibly talented at dissimulation, at pure acting, Gore and Biden are just not that talented, and as a result, they come across as over-acting hams. They cannot really conceal their own insincerity. To succeed at this kind of thing on this level of stage, you need to be Bill Clinton, and only one Bill Clinton comes along every century or two.
First they came for your morphine and cocaine. You don’t remember that because they banned those over a hundred years ago. Then they came for alcohol, but they were forced to give it back. They outlawed marijuana, “the killer weed” which produced “reefer madness” allegedly turning its smokers into violent maniacs just a bit before my generation came along. Then, they went after tobacco. Try lighting a cigarette today in public buildings anywhere in an American city.
Has anybody stopped to wonder what’s next on Puritanism’s hit list? Kelly Freston can tell you.
When I think about the effect of animal products on human health, I’m reminded of how quickly we’ve done a national about face on tobacco, and I look forward to the day when the Times magazine has a similar apology from someone who promoted animal products — because the evidence is in and it continues to grow: Animal products kill a lot more Americans than tobacco does.
The West’s three biggest killers — heart disease, cancer, and stroke — are linked to excessive animal product consumption, and vegetarians have much lower risks of all three. Vegetarians also have a fraction of the obesity and diabetes rates of the general population — of course, both diseases are at epidemic levels and are only getting worse.
But much more important than the vegetarian community’s general statistics are what can be done with the right vegetarian diet: For some years now, doctors have been not just preventing, but even reversing, heart disease using a low-fat vegetarian diet.
That’s right — the disease that kills almost as many Americans as everything else combined can be not just prevented, but reversed, with a low fat plant-based diet, as documented by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn in Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease
.
They’ve evidently converted that confirmed sensualist Bill Clinton. His video impressed me actually. He has lost a lot of weight, and it isn’t difficult to believe that a vegan diet would return most of us to our weight levels in high school (if not in Auschwitz). Trying that diet to lose weight does make a certain amount of sense, and losing weight is undoubtedly good for reducing the progression of heart disease. I’m not sure that I believe that eating like a vegan idiot will actually reverse heart disease though. I did buy Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn’s book and may give that diet a bit of a try.
Rich Lowry compares the GOP’s favorite unfaithful husband to his former adversary in the White House.
Newt is the Republican Clinton — shameless, needy, hopelessly egotistical. The two former adversaries and tentative partners have largely the same set of faults and talents. They are self-indulgent, prone to disregard rules inconvenient to them, and consumed by ambition. They are glib, knowledgeable, and imaginative. They are baby boomers who hadn’t fully grown up even when they occupied two of the most powerful offices in the land.
Steven Gillon, author of The Pact, a book about the Gingrich-Clinton interplay in the 1990s, was struck by their “unique personal chemistry, which traced back to their childhoods.†Both were raised by distant or abusive stepfathers and surrounded by strong women. Both were drawn to politics and wanted to serve, in Newt’s case on a vast, civilizational scale. Both were allegedly sleeping around on the campaign trail before they had won anything.
Yet their personalities are different. Growing up in an alcoholic household, Gillon notes, Clinton was a natural conciliator. Gingrich was given to defiance. Clinton was gregarious, a people-pleaser. Gingrich was bookish, a lecturer at heart. Clinton made his way in politics in the unfriendly territory of Arkansas; he had to dodge and weave and seduce. Gingrich climbed through the ranks of the House Republican conference; he stood out as a partisan provocateur.
And so he remains today. He utterly lacks the Clinton soft touch. No one will ever consider him a lovable rogue. Quin Hillyer of the American Spectator says he’s the “Bill Clinton of the Right with half the charm and twice the abrasiveness.†Republican voters lit up by his debate performances believe he’s the most electable candidate, even though the three recent national polls show him with a favorable rating in the 20s. Presidents dip that low after they lose a war or before they get impeached. Newt Gingrich starts out there.
And he ends by joining a growing chorus of pundits predicting doom, because Newt Gingrich is just too obnoxious to be electable.
I will readily admit that I am personally biased strongly in favor of excessively talkative, intellectually condescending guys with overly large waistlines, and it’s obviously true that Newt is never going to win the Mr. Congeniality award. Yes, the American voting public does have a decided preference for smooth and handsome guys with positive charisma.
But… I agree with the statements made frequently during the GOP debates that any of the candidates on that stage could defeat Barack Obama. Obama is going into next Fall’s election with an albatross of the US economy around his neck that nobody could overcome. Voters will be desperate and will find a way to justify voting for anybody offering change from the current administration and the current economic mess.
When things really go to pot, the voters will throw the bastards out and give the other side a chance. You doubt it? Let me remind everyone: they elected Richard Nixon twice. Newt Gingrich may not be Cary Grant, but compared to Nixon he is Mr. Charm.
Pete Robinson reflects gloomily about Republican prospects, noting that the Republican base is bound to dwindle as the national illegitimacy rate skyrockets. (AEI article:)
Forty years after the Moynihan report, the tragic saga of the modern black family is common knowledge. But the tale of family breakdown in modern America is no longer a story delimited to a single ethnic minority. Today the family is also in crisis for this country’s ethnic majority: the so-called white American population….
Consider trends in out-of-wedlock births. By 2002, 28.5 percent of babies of white mothers were born outside marriage in this country. Over the past generation, the white illegitimacy rate has exploded, quadrupling since 1975, when the level was 7.1 percent. The overall illegitimacy rate for whites is higher than it was for black mothers (23.6 percent) when the Moynihan report sounded its alarm….
Today no state in the Union has an Anglo illegitimacy ratio as low as 10 percent. Even in predominantly Mormon Utah, every eighth non-Hispanic white infant is born out of wedlock.
Pete discusses these demographics over dinner in Hanover, New Hampshire with Mark Steyn, who points out that the dramatic changes to the American national character can be readily observed even in rural Northern New England.
For miles in every direction, Mark noted, lay country that until just a few decades ago represented the heartland, so to speak, of the flinty, resourceful, independent Yankee spirit. Now? “You’ll see lovely girls in the local high schools,” Mark said. “When you come across them again five years later, they’ll each have three children by three different fathers.” Then Mark told a story.
In colonial times, it was against crown law to cut down any pine that exceeded a certain girth–twenty-some inches, as I recall–because all such trees were reserved for the use of the Royal Navy, which required a ready supply of masts. Every time you see a colonial house with floorboards more than two feet wide, you’re witnessing an artifact of the American spirit–an act of rebellion. Mark pointed to the floorboards in the restaurant, some of which were certainly more than two feet wide. “Two centuries ago,” he said, “the families in these parts were felling trees in defiance of the crown. Today they’re raising their children on welfare checks.”
Woe to us all.
It probably is worth noting that both of the last two presidents elected by the democrat party may not have been born in wedlock. William Jefferson Clinton, given the name William Jefferson Blythe III at birth, is widely rumored not to have really been the offspring of the traveling salesman William Blythe II who perished in an automobile crash three months before Bill Clinton’s birth. Barack Hussein Obama is certainly of illegitimate birth, as his parents’ marriage was bigamous and invalid.
Barack Obama, Sr. had married Kezia Aoko aka “Grace” in 1954 and had already had two children, prior to his attending the University of Hawaii and marrying Stanley Ann Dunham in 1961. No divorce from Kezia ever occurred, and Barack Sr.’s first wife Kezia is still alive today.
The Politico exposes a hidden Obama, unknown to the public at large:
He respects, and somewhat identifies with, the serious, innovative, and strongly conservative Rep. Paul Ryan from Wisconsin (!). How very, very odd. Obama certainly has not been taking any advice from Paul Ryan.
He wants to be like Bill Clinton, not Jimmy Carter. (!!) Wouldn’t that involve retreating on the idea of nationalizing American healthcare and moving toward the center?
And he really likes taupe.
[H]e likes taupe. In redecorating the Oval Office, Obama replaced Bush’s yellow sunburst carpet with and earth-tone rug, put up new tan wallpaper and swapped out a coffee table for a walnut-and-mica table. “I know Arianna [Huffington] doesn’t like it,†Obama said. “But I like taupe.â€
One assumes that, as is traditional, the bride’s parents were paying for the wedding. The Clintons, of course, haven’t got a dime that hasn’t come from leveraging the power and fame associated with politics. Their kind of politics consists of exchanging favors and money taken directly from the public purse for personal advantage. We have currently something on the order of 20% real unemployment in this country, and close to 10% of all the home mortgages in the country are currently in default. The latest wave of recession stories talk about the depletion of the life-time savings of middle class Americans, who are emptying their retirement accounts in order to stay afloat. The economic catastrophe is directly connected to mortgage lending policies enacted during the administration of William Jefferson Clinton. So, although I tend to have little sympathy for class warfare, I think that white trash thieves and looters feasting and celebrating their daughter’s nuptials on a stupendous scale in a grand, inner sanctum of the American aristocracy at a time in which ordinary Americans are experiencing long unprecedented and major financial distress does have precisely the aspect of Neronian irony that this Doug Ross piece notes.
There really are two Americas: the Democrat ruling class and everyone else.”
“I missed him even before he was gone.” Steve Bodio remembers long-time Audubon magazine editor Les Line, who evidently had a Weatherby cartridge board and a poster of a Smith & Wesson Model 29 in his Manhattan office.
———————————–
Progressive Amnesia: James E. Calfee responds to the attacks on Rand Paul for “not understanding” that state coercion of private businesses was necessary to end segregation by pointing out that the system of racial segregation in public accomodations known as “Jim Crow” was not created by the individual decisions of private business owners. It was put into effect by government through a series of laws passed by Progressive era legislators which were then upheld by the Supreme Court.
———————————–
NYT: White House Used Bill Clinton to Ask Sestak to Drop Out of Race.
18 USC Section 600: Whoever, directly or indirectly, promises any employment, position, compensation, contract, appointment, or other benefit, provided for or made possible in whole or in part by any Act of Congress, or any special consideration in obtaining any such benefit, to any person as consideration, favor, or reward for any political activity or for the support of or opposition to any candidate or any political party in connection with any general or special election to any political office, or in connection with any primary election or political convention or caucus held to select candidates for any political office, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.
I wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: “Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust.” Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: “We pay so much for the government and it can’t cap an undersea oil well!”
All sorts of people, several I’d never have suspected of being quite so racially sensitive, gleefully piled onto Harry Reid yesterday taking advantage of the scandalous revelation in Game Change, a new book about the 2008 presidential election contest, that Reid had expressed the opinion that Obama was electable because he was “light-skinned” with “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
“Negro” was suddenly discovered to be a vulgar and nasty pejorative, off limits in respectable society. And GOP Chairman (and opportunistic African-American) Michael Steele promptly called for Reid’s resignation from his Senate leadership post on grounds of PC taboo violation.
[It’s] hard not to bathe in schadenfreude at the hammering [Harry Reid] is now getting over an interview he gave to John Heilemann and Mark Haperin during 2008 for their new book… But it is also hard not to be disgusted by the politically correct sanctimony of Republicans like the RNC’s Michael Steele who are acting as if they just caught the Nevada senator in a Klan costume.
“Negro†is the new n-word now? And is it not true that Obama’s light skin color and the half-white background that produced it was indeed an electoral asset? And didn’t the ability to talk like a brother as well as a Harvard grad sharpen the President’s ineffable hipness and post-racial appeal? Can the lexicon of the politically taboo have become such a fat book as this?
Instead of standing back with folded arms and watch the Democrats wallow in the squalor they created by forcing Reid to grovel for redemption from Al Sharpton, Julian Bond, the execrable Cong. Barbara Lee, and other race hustlers, Steele has demanded a leading role in this nasty spectacle. He says that the situation Reid created is similar to the one in 2002 when Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott was forced out of his leadership position for praising Strom Thurmond. Right. No doubt about it. But it was also the Republicans, cowering under the Democrats ludicrous charges of “racism,†who caved and forced Lott out. And while there is obviously a gleeful temptation to require Reid and the Democrats to endure the same standards now that took Lott down back then, Steele and the Republicans are taking the shabby way out again. If they don’t know that getting leverage by calling an opponent a racist (a term like “McCarthyite,†which no longer describes a pathology but is no more than a way of stigmatizing someone on the cheap) debases our political culture, who does? How many times have they been hit over the head with this charge? How can they not know that this is a game in which Republicans might score a run now and then but can never win. Nobody beats the Democrats at race-baiting!
By pointedly not doing to Reid what was done to Lott and making it into one of those “teachable moments†our President likes to talk about, Steele could have done the country a service. Instead, he supported a status quo in our politics in which the race card is always the first one dealt and always from the bottom of the deck.
—————————————-
Patterico favors proceeding with the un-PC hunt, pointing out how often Harry Reid has played this game himself.
You can’t resign from being a former president, so William Jefferson Clinton will have to be allowed to get away with revealing his true racial perspective to the late Senator Edward Kennedy, remarking upon the incongruity of the upstart Obama challenging Mrs. Clinton for the democrat party nomination by noting: “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”
—————————————-
Disgraced former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich (who resigned after trying to sell Obama’s senate seat) chimed in, too, with the following comparison.
I’m blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where we lived. I saw it all growing up.”
Harvard football fans supporting their team (with a little help from Yale)
In New Republic, Noam Scheiber explains the Barack Obama is more disciplined, efficient, ethical, and scandal-free than the last democrat president, Bill Clinton, and that the differences between the two are attributable to the differing culture and educational approaches of Harvard and Yale Law Schools.
If a transition tells you something about a president’s style–if not his chances of success–then Bill Clinton and Barack Obama could hardly be more different. Clinton was often at his worst as president-elect. Key rules were overlooked (Hillary spent weeks flirting with a cabinet job before learning that anti-nepotism laws precluded it) and key setbacks were self-inflicted (gays-in-the-military shot up Clinton’s to-do list after an offhand comment to Andrea Mitchell). Clinton spent so much time assembling his cabinet that he only had three weeks to hire senior White House staff. All in all, the process betrayed a stunning disregard for Washington protocol. Which was how the Clintons wanted it. Hillary had decreed that no Washington insider would get a job that could be filled by a friend or loyalist.
Obama’s transition was a contrast in almost every respect. His political decisions were free of sentiment or ego (who else would grant Joe Lieberman a reprieve?). His tactical maneuvering bespoke a reverence for Washington institutions (which is how GOP moderates like Olympia Snowe found themselves bathed in presidential attention). He rolled out his team with brutal efficiency and stocked it with Beltway know-how. Even his public pronouncements were strikingly spare. In December of 1992, Clinton staged a two-day, 20-hour economic summit, every minute of it broadcast on C-SPAN. In late 2008, Obama briefly fielded questions after closed-door meetings while his brain trust looked on sternly.
What accounts for these differences? There’s no doubt a characterological component–Obama’s self-control is nearly inhuman, Clinton’s is famously lacking. But part of the explanation also lies in the elite institutions that socialized them–namely Harvard and Yale, their respective law schools. The two schools stand on opposite sides of a cultural chasm in the academic world. Even more than that, they stand for different theories of governing. …
Whereas Harvard prided itself on instilling discipline, Yale believed its mission was to unlock students’ innate brilliance in an atmosphere of freedom, intimacy, and intellectual ferment. Harvard was, in certain respects, a three-year hazing ritual. Yale was more like a three-year Renaissance Weekend. Its graduates had been reassured of their eclat from the moment they set foot on campus.
Read the whole thing, then roll around on the floor a bit.
Four federal agencies enforce the CRA, a banking regulation whose original purpose of encouraging homeownership among the poor was well-intended. Abused by the Clinton administration, however, the act triggered the subprime crisis by relaxing lending standards across both the primary and secondary mortgage markets.
These agencies, which over the years have become entrenched in pushing the act, include the FDIC, Office of Thrift Supervision, the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve. Top agency officials each took a turn Monday defending the CRA during a C-SPAN-covered panel discussion on the housing crisis.
OTS director John Reich insisted it “had absolutely nothing to do with the mortgage crisis.” FDIC chief Sheila Bair said it was a “myth,” adding that “it’s really unfortunate that this is out there.” “It’s simply not true,” she asserted. Next up was Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan, who agreed the CRA “certainly was not the cause of the subprime crisis.” …
In a more aggressive pursuit of “social justice,” the Clinton administration revised the CRA in April 1995 to mandate that banks pass lending tests in “underserved” communities and suffer tough new sanctions for failing to make enough loans there.
According to the language of the new Clinton regs, banks that used “innovative or flexible lending practices” to address the credit needs of low-income borrowers passed the test. Banks with poor CRA ratings were hit with stiff fines and blocked from expanding their operations. Soon, “flexible” lending became the norm, and banks used subprime loans, which charge higher interest rates, to cover the added risk.
But it wasn’t enough. So Clinton ordered HUD to pressure Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy the higher-risk loans from private banks and lenders, while adopting the same “flexible” credit standards. By 2000, HUD had mandated that low-income mortgages — including CRA-related loans — make up half of their portfolios.
To further spread the risk, Clinton legalized the securitization of such mortgages. In 1997, Bear Sterns securitized the first CRA loans — $385 million worth, all guaranteed by Freddie Mac. Thus began the massive bundling of subprime mortgages that wound up poisoning the entire industry.
The cause and effect is clear. As ex-Fed chief Alan Greenspan recently testified: “It’s instructive to go back to the early stages of the subprime market, which has essentially emerged out of the CRA.”
It strains credulity for top regulators to now say the CRA had “absolutely nothing” to do with the subprime crisis. It smacks of political spin and bureaucratic CYA.
