The Critical Mom and the Debate

America buys youth, but will it buy Paul Ryan?  He's ethnically identical to Joe Biden, but younger, cockier, and more earnest.  It's the overly earnest part of him that may have done him in.  I'm banking on Obama, but I know his youth was part of the ticket to his success.  Biden and Ryan have in common their Catholic identity, which makes them want to take care of people--but their ideas of doing so diverge, especially when it comes to medicare.  Biden could barely contain his contempt for the "malarky" and "stuff" coming out of Paul Ryan. What, the moderator wanted to know, was "stuff?"  Chortle, chortle, we all knew from the note of contempt exactly what "stuff" he meant--the stuff you hope you don't have to scrape off your shoe if you've walked through any area where dogs relieve themselves.  Biden's benevolent patronage of Ryan--"my friend," he called him, may have won him a few points.  The bald spot on the back of his head didn't.  The schoolboy manner of Ryan, taking careful notes and guzzling the water from which he was supposed to sip, like English people nibbling at their cucumber sandwiches, got him a few demerits.  I'm still betting on Obama, have just filled out my absentee ballot in his favor, and, as I head out to the post office, envision some office in lower Manhattan, on Varick street, where (I imagine) a League of Woman Voters lady will open the envelope, put my ballot through the slit in a ballot box, tag the envelop in which it was stowed carefully, and wait, fingers crossed, for more ballots to come in for Obama.  Then she'll go out for dim sum at some little hidden place unfeatured on the web, the best kind of place, where nobody speaks English and there's no menu--they just keep bringing little plates to the table.  When you're done eating, they count the dishes and hand you a check.
Like something out of A Cricket in Times Square . .  .