Reality Check: The Vice-Presidential Debate
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- The guys who usually play second fiddle in the race for the White House stole the spotlight in a much different debate than their bosses gave us last week.
Vice-President Joe Biden and VP hopeful Paul Ryan met Thursday night in Kentucky.
The debate touched on everything from the economy, taxes, and Medicare, to foreign policy.
Deep in the weeds, and a lot of spin.
Let's take Medicare, a big part of the campaign -- much of what you heard was deceptive.
Biden says Romney and Ryan will change it to a voucher plan; that's partly true, but misleading.
They plan to offer checks to future seniors to buy private insurance, and say it will offer 100 percent coverage.
Ryan says Obamacare takes $716 billion from Medicare benefits?
That's not true.
It slows Medicare growth by cutting payments to doctors and hospitals.
Both sides keep repeating that spin on Medicare; both are false.
One moment that never came up in the last debate was Romney's 47 percent secret tape, in which he said he would never care about 47 percent of Americans who don't pay income taxes.
A gleeful Vice-President Biden wielded it like a knife on Thursday, and Ryan was ready with a response to the gaffe-prone Biden.
If Biden's job was to reclaim the momentum that President Obama lost during the last debate, he did that. Tonight you saw Joe Biden in top form.
