By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 23rd, 2012 
I felt like I was watching the Seinfeld Show. The debate reminded me of the famous episode, in which Jerry and George decide to pitch a situation comedy show to NBC, a show about nothing, about the interactive foibles of daily life, i.e. in the episode George and Jerry share with the audience the premise of the humor of the show they were watching (then America’s most popular). “Debate about nothing” seemed to be the Romney performance strategy last night. Again, as in the first two debates, the Governor moved to the center, but this time he pretended to oppose Obama as he adopted all of Obama’s policies, for better and for worse: on Libya, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and drones. Romney pretended to bury Obama, as he in fact, praised his policies.
Romney expressed his opposition in his body language, in his characterization of Obama’s policies, in name calling, “apology tour” and all, as he supported substantively just about all the policies. Obama’s foreign policies can be and should be criticized by doves and hawks alike, by those who support torture as enhanced interrogation, including Romney until yesterday, and those, including me, who worry about the self-defeating sacrifice of human rights in the name of security, but Romney would have none of this. There is a pressing need for a serious foreign policy debate but Romney had a pitch planned and he professionally delivered it: a potential commander-in-chief, who is not too scary. I am impressed by his acting abilities, which did give reasons for some of his supporters and spinners to be pleased last night and leads me to despair about American democracy.
I can’t emphasize enough how strange Romney was, much stranger than George and Jerry. Of the three debates, last night’s was the most peculiar. As with the other two, it was viewed by the audience and by the performers mostly as . . .
Read more: A Debate About Nothing: Barack Obama v. Mitt Romney (with the Assistance of Jerry Seinfeld)
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 12th, 2012 
As a supporter of Obama – Biden, I found the debate last night soothing. Biden performed well, better than Ryan. From my partisan point of view, it was a good night. After the first Obama – Romney debate, I had a hard time sleeping. Last night, I slept like a baby.
In form and substance, I think Biden was convincing, presenting passionately and clearly the case for re-election, providing Obama a proper introduction for a debate comeback. The contrasting approaches to the practical challenges of our times were on clear view and, I believe, Biden made the Democrats approach more cogent, while Ryan was not able to overcome the contradictions of the conservative Romney-Ryan approach.
First form: Republicans are in convinced. Biden was boorish, Gore – like, patronizing rude. Fred Barnes at the Weekly Standard summarizes their judgment: “You don’t win a nationally televised debate by being rude and obnoxious. You don’t win by interrupting your opponent time after time after time or by being a blowhard. You don’t win with facial expressions, especially smirks or fake laughs, or by pretending to be utterly exasperated with what your opponent is saying.”
Indeed Biden was highly expressive. He interrupted Ryan. He smiled, laughed and non-verbally belittled his opponent. I knew as I watched Biden’s performance that the Republican partisans would draw the Gore analogy. I worried, but was also enthused. Now that I have had a bit of time to deliberately consider the evening, I think that there was good reason for my enthusiasm.
Biden non-verbally framed the debate, deflecting Ryan’s criticisms, highlighting the thinness of the Romney-Ryan critique of the administrations foreign policy, and the contradictions of the Romney Ryan economic plans. Take a look at the embedded video. Notice that Biden’s expressive behavior was responsive to what Ryan was saying and that it is consistent with what we know about Biden, the man, how he presented himself last night and how he has presented himself in our experience.
Biden is an honest Joe, sitting at the bar, infuriated by . . .
Read more: Biden Wins: So What?
By Michael Weinman, August 16th, 2011 
 In a recent post, Jeff frames the troubling inflexibility in contemporary American politics in terms of our fallibility as political actors, and the need to recognize it, concluding: “Compromise between two fallible competing opinions is a virtue. Compromise of a perceived truth is a vice.” This leads me back to the thought left open at the close of my last post. There, in the context of my skepticism about the deployment of the trope of “growing pains” in political affairs, I called into question the “epistemic certainty” that such a narrative entails. Fairly often, we hear that such certainty is impossible: this position can be called one form of “political fallibilism.” In this first sense, “political fallibilism” means something like the conscious cultivation of not being too certain about things political, about one’s views of what is, but also about what must be done. That is, one knows that no matter how right one is, one is at least a little bit wrong. And one knows that, however much one knows about what is happening, there is even more that one does not know, and probably still more that one doesn’t know what one does not know.
We can call this first form of political fallibilism, as our sitting President has, self-conscious humility. Jeff has highlighted what is good and worthy in this practice, especially when compared with strident ideological inflexibility. This argument has also been forcefully put forward in a long-standing controversy about the existence and nature of an “Obama Doctrine.” Some commentators approve of this policy, and others don’t; all agree that the Administration is trying, anyway, to strike a balance between “realism” and “idealism,” between Kissingerian realpolitik and George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda.” In other words, the Administration’s policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and more recently (and more tortuously) in Libya, is all about recognizing political fallibilism, even if not always put expressly in those terms. More recently, over the past weeks, with the circus over the debt ceiling . . .
Read more: Two Forms of (Political) Fallibilism
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