Biden, Ryan prepare for V-P debate

Vice President Joe Biden faces Paul Ryan, the Republican who wants the job, in their only debate Thursday night. Biden's mission: to stop President Barack Obama's slide in the polls after a lacklustre performance in last week's presidential debate with Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

In what promises to be one of the closest presidential elections in recent US history, 69-year-old Biden, an elder statesman and former senator, is expected to vigorously challenge the deeply conservative Ryan, a 42-year-old Wisconsin congressman, most known as a specialist on the US budget and a drive to make deep cuts in government spending lower the deficit.

Polls show Americans are feeling better about the struggling economy as unemployment fell below 8 per cent for the first time since Obama took office shortly after the near collapse of the country's financial system. That helps Biden and Obama.

Ryan will be debating in the wake of Romney's powerful debate showing at a time when many Americans are only just beginning to pay attention to the campaign. Obama appeared distracted and missed multiple opportunities to challenge Romney on sudden changes on issues, taxes in particular, an attempt to place him in a far more moderate stance than before. Obama's failure to engage on that and other seeming position shifts left Romney a clear field in a bid to capture support of the undecided and moderate centrists voters who will likely decide who next sits in the White House after the November 6 vote.

The Biden-Ryan give-and-take will engage many issues but none, polls show, is more important than the struggling economy, which has been slow to recover from the recession through nearly four years of Obama's leadership and has been weighed down by persistent high unemployment.

However, the Thursday night debate at a small Kentucky college will not settle the contest. Instead it will, most likely, set a tone and a foundation for Tuesday's town hall style debate between Obama and Romney in Hempstead, New York, the second of three confrontations.

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