I watched the debate last night in the isolation chamber in an attempt to avoid the inherent Heisenberg problems created by Twitter. I still haven’t read any other reactions to it (save one tweet by John Hinderaker) so the following are really just first blush impressions:

* As you can tell from the image to the right, I really, really like Paul Ryan. He’s impressive and admirable. He’d make a great vice president. Might even make a great president. Certainly, if I could choose from the four guys on the ballot this year, he’d be my first choice.

* That said, I thought he had a catastrophically bad night.

* He did a couple things well: He stayed calm and unflappable in the face of a constant, belligerent assault. He was much better on foreign policy than anyone might have expected. His closing statement was powerful and genial; the last five minutes of the debate were his best.

* On nearly every other score, my impression was that Ryan got crushed. He looked and sounded like a lightweight (which, to be clear, he’s not). His tone on offense was grating and tinny. His demeanor on defense weak. He looked out of his depth at every turn. He had no grasp of the political theater inherent in a debate.

Example: In talking about Syria, Biden backed Ryan into a corner where it made him appear as though he was advocating U.S. troop deployment (which he clearly wasn’t). Biden then made him look like an opportunist by asking, What would you do differently? And the only thing Ryan could do was talk retroactively about what words Romney would have used in talking about Assad. Pressed again by Biden, Okay, but going forward, what would you do differently? Ryan had absolutely nothing to say.

That pattern was replicated all night long. The net effect was, for me, the impression that here’s a nice young man who is in no way ready for the big leagues. (I’m not saying this is the objective truth, mind you–see above. But as Clint once said, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”)

* Biden was an incredibly effective hatchet-man. Think for a moment about his strategic goals for the night: No one changes their votes based on a VP debate, so what Biden wanted to do was stop the momentum from the first debate cold by bludgeoning Ryan and Romney and preventing Ryan from getting any traction which might have allowed him to stand up as the forward-looking, serious partner to the project Romney presented last week.

To my eyes, he accomplished this goal. Biden’s performance doesn’t move the polls, but it stops the emerging narrative of Romney-Ryan being on an unstoppable rise and sets the table for Obama in next week’s debate. The analogy which leapt to mind was Biden as a middle-reliever: He came in with bases loaded and no outs and then retired the side. You couldn’t ask for much more from him.

* Was Biden dishonest and unpleasant? Absolutely. Just to pick one example, look at his outrageous answer on the HHS mandate. But part of Biden’s strength is his ability to spout nonsense with perfect conviction. Consider his answer on his Catholicism and abortion. Again, it was maddeningly dishonest. But as a piece of political theater–he slowed down, cast his eyes toward the desk somberly, dropped his voice a register–it was fantastically effective.

As for Biden’s decision to constantly laugh at, mock, and interrupt Ryan, it struck me that he turned the dial up too far. Did he come across like a jerk? To Republicans, sure. And maybe even to some swing voters. But he wasn’t there to make friends. If you’re on the fence about voting for Obama after the disaster of the last four years, 90 minutes of mean Joe Biden aren’t going to push you over the line. Biden was there to stop the current narrative about Romney’s debate win and return to the mission of disqualifying Romney. To my mind, mission accomplished.

* Frankly, Biden’s over-the-top aggro is the only thing that saved Ryan from what could have been a career-ending night.

* Martha Raddatz was an utter embarrassment. I can’t tell if she was more Tim Donaghy or Earl Hebner. She was both unfair (rescuing Biden whenever he came near to danger and hounding Ryan without remorse) and stupid (turning a policy question about abortion into a “personal story” question about faith). If she ever moderates a presidential-level debate again, it’ll be a scandal.

* All of that said, I’ll be interested to go and see what the CW is.

Frequent Czabe caller E_ pointed out the other day that Israel’s hats for the upcoming World Baseball Classic are pretty fantastic. He’s right. Total hotness.

(1) “Romney says abortion legislation isn’t part of his agenda.”

 “There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda,” the GOP presidential candidate told The Des Moines Register’s editorial board during a meeting today before his campaign rally at a Van Meter farm.

(2) “Romney’s overly optimistic tax plan.”

I asked a tax policy expert to crunch the numbers on a typical household with an individual filer and deduction amounts. Consider them an evangelical suburbanite at the $100,000 level who has a mortgage, tithes, and has some annual medical expenses. Here’s what comes back:

“If you make $100,000, have a new $300,000 mortgage @ 4 percent, tithe 15 percent, pay $5,000 in state/local taxes, and have $7,500 in qualified medical expenses, you would pay $12,100 in federal income taxes on AGI of $60,500 w/ deductions of $39,500 (assume 20 percent effective rate). Under the Romney plan, you’d pay $13,280 (new effective rate would be 16 percent on AGI of $83,000), an increase of nearly 10 percent.”

Click your heels together three times and say, “There’s always the SCOTUS.”

I get about 200 press releases emailed to me every day. There all pretty stupid but sometimes one of them really jumps out.

Today it’s a release from Visintine & Ryan PR on behalf of some guy named Kevin Ryan who claims–well, let’s let the release do the talking:

Will Blacks Vote for Obama?  Black Sphere radio host Kevin Jackson says “not so fast”

Kevin Jackson, radio host of the “Black Sphere,” author and blogger thinks Obama will struggle with this key voting block – here’s why . . .   

Really? I mean, really?

What do we think the over-under is on the black vote for Obama this time around? 96.5 percent? Or 97.0 percent? What’s the absolute, total-implosion, worst percentage Obama is going to pull from black voters? 94 percent? But hey, “not so fast”! Kevin Jackson will “add an unexpected viewpoint to the debates, no matter who wins or loses.  Please let us know if you would like to set something up.”

A couple weeks ago when Politico ran their big story about infighting in the Romney campaign after the GOP convention, the lede was centered around the creation of Romney’s acceptance speech and a lot of people publicly mused that speechwriter Matt Scully was behind the leak.

That suspicion seemed, at the time, a really big reach. It didn’t fit Scully’s persona or modus operandi. And Scully had no clear motive for planting the story. The most likely source seemed to clearly be someone quite close to Romney, a true believer who had a beef with Stuart Stevens.

Today, Politico has another story out which publicly credits Tagg Romney for leading a pre-debate rebellion against Stevens. Both pieces were written by the same co-authors. This has the appearance of being the denouement of the first piece, where credit is finally given to the parties leading the internal fight against Stevens so that Romney could be Romney. I wouldn’t bet $10,000 that Tagg was behind the first story, too. But in light of today’s piece it seems to me that any suspicion of Scully as the leaker should probably be put to bed.

I realize that outside of a very small world, no one much cares about this. But Scully is one of the true good guys in politics. And gossip linking him to that Politico leak is the kind of thing which inflicts real damage on someone’s career. Which he doesn’t deserve.

The case for suspecting Scully was always weak. Now it’s inoperable.

Update: I probably should be more specific. It would be honorable for Dave Weigel to revisit this item he wrote about Scully. (And the subsequent Twitterendo.)

Oh. Oh no.

Abe Greenwald touches on a very deep point about American culture:

 There is a great and growing divide between what our political reality demands and what our culture now produces, and Bruni gets nowhere near it. Sacrifice is vanishing because the cultural institutions that promote or sanctify it—family, faith, and patriotism—are on the wane. “In 1960, two-thirds (68%) of all [American] twenty-somethings were married,” a 2010 Pew study found. “In 2008, just 26% were.” And in 2011, American births fell to a 12-year low. To previous generations the demands of family meant a life defined by self-denial, delayed gratification, and the giving of one’s time, energy, and money. Is a 42 percent drop in those who claim such an existence supposed to have no effect on the quality of our national character?

As you might imagine, I have quite a lot to say about this in What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, which, coincidentally, is now available for pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, and Books-a-Million.

(That’s a temp cover–the final cover art should be coming soon-ish.)

Friend of a Galley Friend Dylan Meconis is basically beau ideal of the hyper-literate, classics-nerd, comics artist-writer. And her ongoing graphic novel Family Man will be catnip to certain Galley Readers. (I’m looking at you, Gormogons.) Here’s a section from her intro:

. . . Amidst all this confusion, Europe is clattering into a new age.  The Age of Faith and the Age of Beauty have both run their course, and now it’s Reason’s turn to try to explain the human condition.  Suddenly everybody thinks the answers will be revealed by the next microscope slide, wild manuscript, or enlightened political upheaval.

Everybody, that is, except for a young scholar by the name of Luther Levy, who has an increasing stock of Questions and a diminishing supply of Answers.  Caught between a rock and his own hard head, Luther has returned home from University short one doctorate in Theology and (possibly) one belief in God.

Luther does his best to find comfort in his eclectic family (and a healthy dose of self pity).  Self-pity won’t pay the rent, though, and Luther has become desperate for employment, which isn’t easy to come by when your only marketable skill is scriptural exegesis.

Her writing is really, really smart and funny. And the art is positively gorgeous. Enjoy.