Perhaps the most important thing to find on Sullivan's blog this morning is that he's been talked down from the ledge ... by Joe Biden.
Biden did a good job last night and he accomplished two things for Democrats. First, he changed the subject from Romney's "momentum," which no longer existed in fact, but stopping the media from discussing it further is helpful. Second, he re-energized some Democrats who were dispirited by the first debate and its aftermath. As you know, I have been arguing that Romney's gain in the polls has been due to greater energy among Republicans and less enthusiasm among Democrats since the first debate. If I'm right that that's what's going on and that Democrats are energized to some degree now, we'll start to see just the slightest narrowing between registered voter numbers and likely voter numbers by Monday or so.
Ryan performed just fine, especially given the difficult position he was in. It isn't easy trying to pretend your numbers add up when they don't. I think Republicans will feel he did just fine and they'll be happy with his performance. But Democrats are very happy with Biden's aggressiveness and his message ... which boils down to one thing: "They're lying." That's it. Republicans won't be affected by it and there are so few undecided voters that their reaction is almost irrelevant. Democrats desperately wanted someone to say "malarkey" loudly and over and over again. And Biden did that.
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Biden did a great job on calling a lie a lie, but a lot of credit needs to be given to Martha Raddatz for her forcefulness on specifics from Ryan.
She was phenomenal.
Biden also revealed the depth of his experience and reminded voters that he's been there through every battle on medicare and social security for decades. I thought he could have mentioned at some point during the tax debate that the tax rates Kennedy and Reagan cut were much higher than anything being debated now. He made the case that the wealthy should pay more, but he didn't point out directly that more tax cuts for the wealthy won't help grow the economy. That's not a hard case to make.
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