Political analysts seem confused about Vice President Joe Biden’s derisive smiling while Congressman Paul Ryan was speaking during their debate. Some analysts speculate that Biden’s derision was designed to make the Democratic base feel good because Biden was pushing back hard against Ryan after the President’s overly polite approach in the first debate. These analysts wonder whether any rally-the-base benefit will be outweighed by independent voters who found Biden’s smirking rude. I believe this analysis misses the point.

I’m convinced Biden’s smiling was a deliberate, well-considered, and probably carefully practiced tactic. Biden and his debate coaches knew that television would be using a split screen that showed both the speaker and the reaction of the participant who was listening. Biden began smiling right out of the gate, and he stayed with it except when the moderator’s questions called for a somber tone. Then he dropped it. He knew what he was doing.

What was Biden’s objective? Bear in mind that a vice-presidential debate is, at best, only secondarily about the vice-presidential candidates. People vote for presidents, not vice presidents. The only time VP candidates make a decisive difference is when voters fear that a vice-presidential candidate would be deep over his head if circumstance required him to assume the presidency. Some voters had concerns about Dan Qualye’s ability to be a capable president if something happened to George H. W. Bush, and many voters considered Sarah Palin flatly unqualified. But Paul Ryan is a smart and knowledgeable man who has served fourteen years in Congress. It would have been a fool’s errand to try to persuade voters that Ryan was unqualified. Neither Biden nor his debate coaches are fools, and that was not their strategy.

Romney’s Achilles’ heel is how voters view him in terms of honesty and trustworthiness. One of the most salient facts about Romney is that he’s a flip-flopper, and flip-floppers are, almost by definition, hypocrites and dissemblers. The exceptions are candidates who straightforwardly admit that they have changed their mind and explain why. Romney is not in that category. Moreover, not only is Romney a flip-flopper, but the Republican ticket has been torturing the truth beyond even the dismally-low standards of modern campaigns. Ryan’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention was particularly appalling. (Here's an article about falsehoods in both Romney and Ryan's acceptance speeches, and here and here are separate articles about Ryan's alone.)

Biden’s principal strategy during the debate was, I believe, to drive home that Romney and Ryan are not being trustworthy or honest. On numerous occasions, the Vice President did that explicitly. He denounced Ryan’s statements as “malarkey” and “a bunch of stuff”; he declared that “everything [Ryan] just said was totally inaccurate”; he looked into the camera and told voters to “trust your instincts.” Biden’s smiling was calculated to send the same message non-verbally. By smirking, Biden was effectively saying, “You can't trust these guys. What Ryan is saying is laughably wrong.” Moreover, Biden kept delivering this message right while Ryan was speaking. That message was unrelenting.

It is not of great importance whether voters thought Biden was rude or even whether Biden’s performance drove up his own negatives (i.e., the percentage of voters who have an unfavorable impression of him). What matters is whether the debate – when combined with Obama-Biden advertising, the President's statements, and other messaging – helps drive up Romney’s negatives. The Vice President will have accomplished his objective if he sowed seeds of distrust about Mitt Romney in the minds of independent voters, even if he did so at some cost to himself. Looked at this way, Biden’s performance was a generous contribution to the team.

Voters themselves may be unaware of how Biden’s performance affected them so don’t put much stock in polls that asked who respondents thought won the debate or whether the debate made respondents more likely to vote for a particular candidate. Instead, keep an eye on whether Romney’s negatives rise – and, of course, on the key polling question: “For whom do you intend to vote.” As I’ve observed on this blog previously, people know what they like or who they intend to vote for, but often they are not consciously aware of what affects their attitudes.

This is what I wish the President said during the first debate when Mitt Romney said that he had no intention of cutting taxes for the rich and that some business regulations are necessary for the free market to function properly:

""Ah, Governor, this is your Etch-A-Sketch Moment.""

UPDATE (October 6, 2012): As Fareed Zakaria observes in this piece, Mitt Romney has been deftly shaking his Etch-A-Sketch – and not just during the debate. After presenting himself as a ""severe conservative"" to capture the Republican nomination, Romney is now portraying himself as a moderate. He's made this move deftly; and because his campaign was giving them a near-death experience, Republicans are not complaining. It's important that President Obama and Vice President Biden effectively call Romney out on the shift every chance they get. The challenge is to do this without helping to persuade indepedent voters that the real Romney is the moderate Romey, or assuring Republicans that the real Romney is the right-wing Romney. The message ought to be that the real Romney is a chameleon. That, after all, is what the evidence suggests.

I've expanded an earlier post on this blog - Fighting Over the Conservative Banner - into book-chapter length for a symposium in which I recently participated. Here's a brief description of that paper:

Whither Conservatism? That was the question posed to a group of scholars, including Carl T. Bogus, author of Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism (Bloomsbury Press), at a conference co-sponsored by the University of Texas School of Law and the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. In this paper, Professor Bogus argues that conservatism has long been an uneasy alliance among three distinct groups: libertarians, neoconservatives, and religious (or social) conservatives. The glue that held the alliance together is weakening. As the groups drift apart and compete, they are becoming more strident and extreme. Each seeks to become the dominant philosophy of the right. Each seeks to claim the conservative banner, that is, the right to present itself as the one, true, and genuine conservatism. Conservatism is indeed in flux, and its future definition depends on the outcome of this struggle.

If you are interested in reading the paper, you can find it on the Social Science Research Network here.