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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political GabFest for Friday, October 12th, 2012, the Barka Loungeer edition. I'm here in New York, sort of oddly, with John Dixon, Slate's political correspondent and the CBS political director. Did I say that right? Did I, Emily? Hi, yes. And we have a special guest, Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of the Slate Group. I probably messed that up, too. Not a bit. Emily, I'm delighted to be here in the plots chair, but not with the plot's personality.

That's right. A different personality is with us this morning.

Cheers go up from listeners everywhere.

No, sadness. I love the plot's personality.

We like your personality, too, though. We are going to talk about the Biden-Ryan debate, of course, and Romney's surge in the polls. And we're going to close with the Supreme Court's big affirmative action case this week. Before we start, there is a political podcast contest going on on iTunes. And it would actually mean a lot to us. If we could win this

contest, it would help us. We swear. So it would be super if you could go vote for us. If you think

we're the best, of course. You can find a link to the contest on our Facebook page, facebook.com

slash GabFest. And we thank you. Our super PAC will also be suspending in support of the campaign.

Okay, so we all watched the debate last night.

I only fell asleep for the last five minutes.

And John, you wrote this morning and you had a great line saying that Biden was both Ryan's opponent and the guy in the Barka lounger who was spluttering mightily as the debate progressed.

So was this effective or was it just like over the top Bidenisms?

I think, as Bill Clinton used to say, false choice. I think both are true. I think it was effective

in the sense that Democrats loved to see Biden doing all the things they wished Obama had done. You know, the traditional

role of the vice president or the vice presidential candidate in campaigns is to play the

attack dog. And they can do that because they have a little more room to roam than the

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