The Crossed Pond

Chris at the Liberty Papers links to the following interview of Joe Biden by an Orlando TV station.

Biden is clearly expecting softballs, and instead gets “Are you a Marxist?” and the like.

The interviewer apparently decided that the way to make for a “tough” interview is to ask the questions with the most anti-interviewee premises possible. She’s wrong, of course: you make a tough interview not by being a dick or by transcribing the talking points of the most vitriolic opponents and putting them in question form, but by intelligently probing the interviewee where you feel them weakest. I’m sure that she and the station manager are advertising how hardball they are, but honestly, it’s just an example of being lazy and confrontational for the sake of it—a curious variant of “gotchya” journalism where the point isn’t the answers, but the questions, and more importantly, the hoped-for reaction (is the question “how are you not like Karl Marx?” really expected to inform?). But whatever, she’s welcome to her YouTube fame for it and certainly entitled to ask whatever she likes.

Following the interview, the campaign canceled an interview Jill Biden was slated to do for the same affiliate. Which is also entirely their prerogative.

But while this clip is making the rounds among right wing sites as apparently a knock on Biden, here’s what strikes me about it.

Obviously, he’s annoyed by the questions…but he answers them.

Now, watch that clip, and try to imagine, for a moment, either Sarah Palin or John McCain or for that matter GW Bush in a similar situation.

Maybe it’s just me, but after watching it, I find myself thinking a bit better of Biden, not worse. He comes off…well, like the adult in the room.