Vice Presidential Debate – Full Video and poll

CDN’s Michelle Ray will be covering tonight’s Vice Presidential debate

Tonight Vice President Joe Biden will face-off against Republican V.P. candidate Rep. Paul Ryan. The debate will be broadcast live on ABC, CBS, C-SPAN, FOX and NBC, as well as all cable news channels including CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC and a livestream will be hosted on CDN.

Take a look at our user-driven interactive poll at the bottom of this page. You can submit questions before, during and after the debate and see other reader’s feedback immediately.

The contrasts between the V.P. candidates is even larger than between Romney and Obama. Biden is 27 years older than Ryan which puts an entire generation between the two candidates. Biden is a true liberal, populist Democrat while Ryan is a young, fiscally-Conservative Republican. Biden has been featured in 18 debates in his political career which gives him a serious experience edge over Ryan. Both have significant political experience with Ryan being a seven-term Representative as Joe Biden was a seven term Senator before running for President and eventually becoming Obama’s running mate.

Joe Biden has an incredible ability to relate to the ordinary voter. His use of populist rhetoric and colloquialisms echo with both the democratic party base and progressive extreme left. His use of colorful language in public speaking has often been featured in news highlights showing Biden throwing another gaffe at another event. It has become so regular that most dismiss it as “that’s just Joe”.

The Vice President has been scarce on television of late. Since May, he has not done a single television interview while Rep. Ryan has done over 200 since August. This is largely thought to be a move by the campaign to keep Joe off camera as much as possible to avoid any issues that might affect the election.

Tonight’s format will be a sit-down, table conversation. A format heavily favored by the Commission on Presidential Elections, but not so by the campaigns.

This debate is the first chance the Obama-Biden ticket has to rectify itself after a devastatingly poor showing by the President last week. Chris Van Hollen was chosen to play Paul Ryan in Biden’s debate prep while David Axelrod sat over the proceedings. Obviously, the campaign is throwing the big guns at this debate to hopefully stop the bleeding from Obama’s failure to shine.

Whether there will be another “you’re no Jack Kennedy” moment in tonight’s debate or not remains to be seen, but the expectations are fairly close. A Pew poll showed that 34% of respondents expect Biden to win while 40% expect Ryan to do better – a much closer set of results than last week’s debate where most Americans expect the President to bury Mitt Romney.

Full Recorded Video of Debate