Subject: Re: Frank Luntz- on tonights Biden interview,
I’m amazed it took his advisors this long to get to someplace where a recovery is attempted. Heck, it’s been OVER A WEEK. I guess the debate performance was so shockingly bad that it stunned everyone, and Trump was brilliant for going silent (for once in his life) and letting the Democrats hang themselves.

That's one possibility. The other possibility is that the debate performance didn't stun everyone. That his performance was something that his inner circle (who are guiding this response) knew was a possible outcome, because it wasn't a never-before-seen low for Biden. It may simply be that he does, in fact, now have times where that's what he's like because of his age. If that's the case, it makes sense that his advisors would try to see if they could get things under control without having to put Biden into too many public-facing scenarios. Because they know there's a chance that the Biden we saw last week might the Biden we see in those events.

I mean, there's an easy easy fix for this if Biden's performance truly was well outside his normal range of affect: town halls. Biden's never been the most agile of speakers (due to his stutter), and a town hall will never be his best format. But there's no better venue for clearing the super-low bar of demonstrating that a candidate is capable of talking to people in a live, unscripted environment. You can vet the participants eight ways from Sunday and make sure that's he's getting fieldable questions - heck, have single-issue town halls on favorable subjects so that he doesn't have to worry as much about the substantive preparations.

The fact that Biden's team didn't turn to a town hall format, and instead went to only a taped journo interview (so far), is a really bad sign. Yes, I know that it takes more time to set up a town hall than a one-on-one interview - logistically it's more complicated. But they could have announced he was doing a few town halls later in the month. The fact that they haven't, even after seeing that their initial plans to calm the waters have failed, is a troubling indication that his inner circle doesn't think he's up to the job of doing a town hall with any consistent expectation of performing well. Which is a crippling deficiency in a Presidential candidate.