I don’t know what was wrong with Joe Biden. It’s hard to imagine that they ever would have asked for a debate if this was the way he is normally. We’ve seen him recently holding press conferences and giving speeches and he seemed to be fine. They said he had a cold so maybe he really was on drugs — Nyquil or Mucinex or something that made him seem so shaky and frail. Whatever it was, it was a terrible debate for him and if he does stay in the race (which is almost certain in my opinion) the campaign is going to have a lot of work to do to dig out of the hole that was dug last night. The media smells blood and they are circling like a bunch of starved piranhas.
. . . For some odd reason, moderator Jake Tapper told Trump in the beginning that he didn’t need to answer the questions and that he could use the time however he wanted. Trump ran with that, essentially giving a rally speech whenever he had the floor and was unresponsive to the vast majority of the questions. He made faces and insulted Biden to his face, at one point calling him a criminal and a Manchurian candidate. If anyone had said 10 years ago that this would happen at a presidential debate they would have been laughed out of the room.
After the debate when most of the country had turned off cable news or gone to bed, CNN aired its fact check. And it’s a doozy:
It sure would have been good if even some of that epic litany of lies could have been checked while people were still watching. The decision to have the moderators sit like a couple of potted plants woodenly asking questions about child care while Trump responded with irrelevant lies was inexplicable. Why did they even bother to ask questions at all? They could have just run the timer and let the candidates talk for two minutes each about anything they wanted. It probably would have been more enlightening.
I don’t know the details for how far ahead all the rules were decided. I would have assumed months but clearly not.
A BIG news story yesterday was that republicans were angry that there would be live fact checking during the debate. So CNN got rid of that literally the afternoon of the debate. That makes a massive difference because it means that Biden now needed to actively refute the increasingly blatant lies in addition to getting his talking points across.
And the format always went against Biden. His stutter and aphasia do not mix well with short 3 minute responses. With proper debate prep and a focus on talking points, he is mostly good. We had a few moments but even when he was at his most feeble sounding he was fine. But once he had to respond to things like “you are a manchurian candidate” and “you are basically a Palestinian but a bad one”? Then it becomes “okay, call this prick the c-word. Now I need to also cite this fact that is part of my border security answer. And then I need to talk about… jesus christ are we actually talking about global warming right now?”
And that fucked Biden. Because that is not something a POTUS needs to be able to handle. If Kim Jong Un started talking like that during a meeting… we might literally invade North Korea. Almost all meaningful conversation between world leaders is basically heavily scripted speeches or closed door conversations where people acknowledge others are human.
But also? CNN didn’t even follow their own format. They repeatedly unmuted candidates (mostly trump but a few times Biden) so they could get a juicy comeback in.
I mean. Sure I guess?
So it was unfair. Sure.
But Biden and his camp didn’t need to agree to a debate. It was going to get them nothing. There was NOTHING to gain here and everything to lose.
And they lost… everything .
It shows that the Biden team isn’t capable of manging this election; it showed that Biden isn’t capable of offering the rhetoric it takes to win.
The Presidential role is a communications job. If he can’t do the communications part of this, he__cant__win.
It is always worth remembering. During one of (their last?) debates in 2020, trump made a comment that Biden took as an attack on Beau (it was actually Hunter). Biden went fucking ballistic and trump visibly cowered. That basically destroyed the strong man routine instantly and shut everyone up about “Biden is weak”. Another moment like that would have almost guaranteed a win.
But also? Biden is a traditional politician who believes that there should be a debate so that people can make informed decisions. So the usual Democrat bullshit of trying to play by the rules.
But ALSO: If Biden had refused then the news cycle would be nothing but “Biden is a coward” and “Biden is weak”.
There was no winning. But if there had been fact checking and the rules were even kind of adhered to and Biden hadn’t drank a bottle of Nyquil or whatever the fuck happened there? It would have been good. Hell, even just one of those would have probably led to a decisive win.
That would be an understandable reaction from the average person but the president should be a lot more capable than the average person. Even if this specific sort of thing isn’t something he needs to be able to handle, he still needs to handle things a lot harder than this and his performance here isn’t reassuring me that he can. Trump is so predictably rude that Biden should have been totally ready for it.
Nobody has, to my knowledge, ever faulted Biden in a crisis (… well, except the zionism and racism but those are carefully considered platforms and not knee jerk reactions). I know I get a stutter when I need to say a LOT of technical jargon in a row and others have the same issue. When your goal is to get shit done, rather than to clown on someone, people are a lot more able to understand what is being said and will ask for clarification where needed.
It does not matter. If I have trouble saying something then the person I am talking to can immediately key in on “foo?” and I can nod and move on.
It has absolutely zero bearing on leadership unless a bunch of terrorists have taken a building hostage and will kill one person every time Biden stutters while going through an actor’s warm-up exercises. And if Biden hadn’t gone up there sounding like he was dead this would not be an issue outside of the most chuddy of morons and useful idiots.
The problem is that he had all the same stutters and aphasias he has had for decades but ALSO sounded feeble.
People having the metric of “President sounds good when throwing schoolyard insults at people” is how we got less than half of the country voting for the orange fuckstick.