Political guru and best-selling author Dick Morris tells Newsmax that Vice President Joe Biden came across as a “windbag” and a “demagogue” in Thursday’s debate and he accused the second in command of dragging the event down to the level of a “barroom brawl.”
Morris, a former political advisor to President Bill Clinton, said that Biden lacked “dignity” in his many verbal and non-verbal attacks on Ryan.
“I think that the dominant impression that comes across is that he should not be a heartbeat away from the presidency — a combination of just totally inappropriate smiling while Ryan was talking — and interrupting, the almost heckling that went on in the debate,” admonished Morris in an exclusive interview moments after the event.
Urgent Poll: Who Won the Vice Presidential Debate? Vote Here!
Author of the book: “Screwed!: How Foreign Countries Are Ripping America Off and Plundering Our Economy — and How Our Leaders Help Them Do It,” Morris said that he came away thinking “how incredibly horrible” it would be if Biden were to somehow become president.
“I thought Ryan was a little too timid in the sense that he let Biden run over him too much,” he acknowledged. “And I think that he didn’t want to get into the mud pit with Biden but he ended up I think sometimes not defending his views articulately and as well as he could.”
Overall, Morris likened the first — and only — vice presidential debate to an “MSNBC talk show where everybody yells at everybody else and talks over everybody else.”
While Thursday’s debate is not likely to influence voters one way or another, it may affect Biden’s personal appeal with voters.
“I do believe that the dominant effect of it will be to lower significantly Joe Biden’s favorability because I think he was just way over the top in the way he handled the debate,” explained Morris.
He noted that the wide age gap between the two candidates — Biden is 69 and Ryan is 42 — may have worked against the Wisconsin congressman, who chairs the House Budget Committee.
“I think it was in the sense that you saw Ryan as maybe too much of a kid, letting himself be intimidated by Biden,” asserted Morris. “But Biden looked like a caricature of a politician . . . Sometimes I was thinking I was watching ‘Saturday Night Live.’”
Urgent Poll: Who Won the Vice Presidential Debate? Vote Here!
Unlike the first presidential debate, which Morris described as “informative” and probing in a “very knowledgeable substantive way,” he called the vice presidential contest “an absolutely terrible debate” which was marred by Biden’s inappropriate behavior.
“I think he comes across as a brawler and a bruiser — and far more likely to be a longshoreman than a president,” he added.
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