The news media and the Republicans are sharing video snippets of last Thursday night's vice presidential debate. Voters can get an extra helping of Veep Joe Biden chuckling, interrupting, laughing, mugging, smirking and otherwise behaving completely inappropriately. What Team Obama described as "just Joe being Joe" steadily devolved into Joe just being creepy.
A CNN poll showed Paul Ryan winning the debate within the margin of error. A CBS News poll of uncommitted voters reported that 50 percent thought Biden won, 31 percent thought Ryan won and 19 percent judged the debate a tie. But I believe that after days of Biden's mugging saturates the media, the chattering class will understand that this was a bad night for the Obama re-election campaign.
Americans are going to start asking themselves: Is Biden the guy they want to be a heartbeat away from staring down Russian President Vladimir Putin or Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi?
For his part, Paul Ryan signaled what I think Mitt Romney will use as a big selling point during Tuesday night's presidential debate: President Barack Obama cannot work with others.
While Democrats have tried to paint Ryan as an ideologue who cannot and will not cut deals, Ryan was the voice of comity and reason in that debate. Here was the Ryan who fought hard for spending cuts and entitlement reforms but also voted to raise the debt ceiling in 2011.
When Romney was governor of Massachusetts, Ryan argued, he succeeded where Obama failed. He didn't demonize the overwhelmingly Democratic Legislature. "He didn't demagogue them." Romney worked across the aisle, found common ground and balanced the state budget.
Of course, Romney had to work with Democrats. They owned the Statehouse.
Obama, on the other hand, entered office with large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. "Let's not forget that this party came in with one-party control," Ryan reminded voters.
This left Obama with a choice: reach across the aisle because some day your majority may not hold, or freeze out the other party Chicago-style. As Bob Woodward reported in his latest book, "The Price of Politics," Obama's first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, advocated the latter approach, best described as starting with an expletive, and rolling the other side, because you can.
That arrogant attitude led to excesses — unfunded pork-barrel spending, huge deficits and a one-party health care measure — that invited a voter backlash. In November 2010, voters flipped 63 House seats and six Senate seats to the GOP.
Since Romney picked Ryan as his running mate, Democrats have tried to peg the GOP "Young Gun" as an inflexible ideologue who won't work across the aisle. Robert Reich dismissed Ryan as a social Darwinist. Last Thursday, voters saw a GOP leader who hasn't been afraid to propose spending reforms, because he wants to fix what's broken.
As for Biden, he could only repeat five 5-year-old talking points. Republicans, he charged, talk about the Great Recession as if it fell out of the sky, when "it came from this man voting to put two wars on a credit card, to at the same time put a prescription drug benefit on the credit card," ditto the Bush tax cuts. "I was there, I voted against them."
Ryan did not counter that Biden voted for the Iraq war resolution in 2002 and the Afghanistan war in 2001. Biden did vote against the Bush tax cuts and the bad Bush Medicare Part D plan in 2003, but the Obama administration extended both the Bush tax cuts and expanded Medicare Plan D without paying for them.
It would be nice to see Romney make this point Tuesday night when Obama recites the same litany of woes.
Debra J. Saunders writes for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her email address is dsaunders@sfchronicle.com.