Following Thursday night’s vice presidential debate, Fox News Channel senior political analyst Brit Hume said the way viewers react to Vice President Joe Biden’s aggressive demeanor will dictate who “won” the debate.
“Well, it all depends on what they think of Joe Biden and his demeanor,” Hume said. “If you read the transcript, you might conclude that the vice president had a very strong debate, that he had a lot to say, that he was strongly critical of Gov. Romney and his program, that he held his own. But that’s not all there is to it. We had the split screen, much as we did during the presidential debate. And what you saw while Paul Ryan was talking, as others have pointed out was smirking, laughing, smiling, mugging by the vice president.”
Hume said Biden risked coming across as “a cranky old man.”
“My sense was that it was so compelling that people probably couldn’t take their eyes off of it. And so, it will come down to whether or not people thought that was attractive or not. Myself, I thought it was unattractive. I thought it was rude. And I have a feeling it will come across to an awful lot of people as rude. It looked like a cranky old man to some extent, debating a polite young man.