edge and that s where he s going to go. paul: he s got a delicate task because i think he has to defend, jason, i think he has to defend romney against what will be biden s task even as he turns around and tries to go after the president s agenda while showing his own competence on substance, on these issues, that s a more complicated taste and biden is basically going to be all in assaulting romney. and i think that biden is going to want to talk foreign policy and i think the polls have shown that the president s doing good on that, not as well as he was, that gap has narrowed with the events in the middle east, but still, we killed bin laden and bringing troops home. it will be interesting how team romney respond on foreign policy. i don t know if he tries to go too hard on foreign policy in big trouble because of what happened in benghazi, ryan will use that against him and i think damage him very badly. but ryan is a rookie on foreign policy, that s not his area of experti
and so that s what he s going to do, paul ryan himself in kentucky this week and arguably, he s going to have a harder row to hoe here going into the first presidential debate and barack obama, everyone expected he would win and romney needs to put in a good performance and in fact did very well. the argument here is that paul ryan is so great and he will hold his own, but no one should underestimate joe biden. he s going to be okay out there. paul: this may be something of a trap for ryan because you know, the media expectation he s going to do so well and he s a numbers guy and knows his brief and so on, but widen is a real slasher and he s going to go after, i assume, mitt romney, hammer and tong. what does ryan have to do here in this debate? well, he s going to have to fight back, paul. there was once a debate called a kitchen debate. this is going to be the kitchen sink debate and joe biden is going to throw one
government approach which has government thinking it can do a better job than free people pursuing their dreams and that s not working the. proof of that is 23 million people out of work and the proof one out of six people in poverty, the proof 32 million on food stamps to 47 million on food stamps the proof of that 50% of college graduates this year can t find work. paul: there s little doubt romney s commander performance helped the g.o.p. ticket. the question is, how much? let s ask wall street journal columnist and deputy editor dan henninger, mary anna stacia o grady and kim strassel. dan, how important was this debate for mitt romney s candidacy. it was not only very important for mitt romney s candidacy, paul, it was very important for us. i think he both rescued his candidacy and rescued the election. and quite honestly, the
care? when romney comes in and looks like he s a reasonable guy, a competent fellow, he s not scary and talks about his medicare plan in reasonable terms. and that s what i mean. you blow up the fantasy, the caricature, rather, of how he s been portrayed and i think that helps. that s why the debate was so damaging for obama. are we going to see a movement in the poll, dan, as a result of the debate. i think we ll see some movement and romney will get a bump. whether he ll get one in ohio is a good question he s got to keep that momentum going. briefly, james. i think he ll get a bump, but i think the most important outcome for the debate for romney, is that he energized the party and they believe they can win again and i think that s an even more significant accomplishment in the short run than a bump in the polls. jason, thanks. one debate down and three more to go, believe it or not. the vice-presidential candidates get their turn next week in kentucky. can paul
election to this point was kind of boring. it was boring because both candidates in different ways were making it boring. the president, and there have been reports, was kind of coasting through, thinking he had no real competition from mitt romney. and romney was out there basically, expressioning conservative platitudes without elaborating on them. we get to the debate and what mitt romney does is answer the two things i think most voters were looking for, why do you think that barack obama s presidency failed and what ways have he failed it. and what would you propose alternatives, and better than president obama does? he did both of those, went right at the obama record and something the president declined to talk about himself and went deep on his tax policy and his health policy, so he put some entirely new baseline for the election. paul: kim, there are a lot of republicans were willing to start writing off mitt romney if he didn t do welcome. i mean, there really were.