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.
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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.