No. of Recommendations: 12
Albaby, you've earned a lot of respect from me over the years at TMF and here. But this is just BSC doom and gloom talk. Very much unlike you.
Has your account been hacked?Nope. It's me. Of course, that's just what someone who had hacked my account would say....
Anyway, I think it's almost impossible to overstate how catastrophic the debate was for Biden. This wasn't a "bad night," or just a "bad debate." It wasn't even just the worst debate performance in the history of televised debates, although it was that as well. It was a candidate who is an octogenarian, who has been dogged by concerns about his age, demonstrating a very lengthy period where he was acting as though he was enfeebled to the point of cognitive impairment. Not just stuttering, not just a misspoken word or flubbing a line - a good fifteen minutes or so where he acted literally incapable, mentally, of performing a basic part of both campaigning and being President: providing a response to explain, defend, or discuss policy issues.
There's almost no way for Biden to bounce back from this, because there's no way to
explain this. Any candidate can have a night where they're off their game -
no candidate can or should ever display the type of collapse on display in the debate. The campaign has yet to offer an explanation for how that could have happened unless Biden does, in fact, suffer from at least occasional period where he isn't all there. Because he wasn't all there, for a substantial amount of time, on Thursday. The campaign can't undo the damage by showing Biden in other settings being alert and energetic, because that doesn't solve the problem. People who are suffering diminished capacity due to aging often have good period and bad periods - and even having lots of good periods doesn't make the bad periods go away. And most of Biden's defenders won't have a lot of credibility now anyway, because what we all observed during the debate contradicts what they've been claiming about Biden's capacity.
Biden was trailing Trump when it was merely
rumored - and heavily denied - that his faculties had diminished to the point where something like Thursday night was possible. Now every voter in the country has seen it - or
will have seen it, over and over again, by the time the election comes around. The Trump campaign's message is going to be that Biden's no longer mentally capable of serving as President and we have the receipts. It's going to be nearly impossible to come back from that.
And we all have to confront the
real bad possibility here - that Biden
might indeed not be competent to be President any more. Any candidate can have a bad debate, but there's no possibility that a candidate can have this type of response:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q4AlIM2NxY...
without there being some significant factor that caused it. And not a "cold." Which means that there's a non-trivial chance that not only does Biden not have the time or the venue that would allow him to convince people that he doesn't really have mental acuity problems, but that he can't do that because he
does have some mental acuity problems. It's hard enough to overcome a
mistaken impression that Biden's not always mentally up to the job, but it would be impossible to do that if the impression is correct.
