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.

    • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Problem is, the lower information voters don’t know that Trump is lying, and Biden couldn’t point that out in a clear and concise way. He was soft and rambling and wasn’t campaigning competently on that stage.

      He needed to make the case against Trump. Which isn’t hard.

    • nieceandtows@programming.dev
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      3 months ago

      It was Biden’s job to call out Trump’s lies, but he was nowhere near competent enough to do that. See how Trump called out Biden’s incoherence, highlighting the issue to everybody (“yeah you beat medicare to death”, “I didn’t understand the end of that sentence, and I don’t think he does either”, etc)

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      You know what the real problem is? Biden reminded me and millions of other people of our frail grandparents in a stressful, scary, situation. We love them, (although I’m not a fan of Biden), but we don’t let them drive or end up in those situations.

        • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          It’s not about the diehard voters. It’s about the the undecided voters. Which presumes they’d be fine with either.

          • VoterFrog@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            I don’t think you need to be a diehard to recognize that handing the keys over to a frail old person is an easy choice to handing them over to a felon fraudster. It’s crazy that this is even a question.

    • Psycoder@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I am pasting this from another thread where I replied to a person that said he was going to vote for Biden no matter what.

      I don’t care who you vote for. It is very clear to me you will vote for Democrats. That is great.

      I do care about who my aunt and her family votes for, a lot. She is democrat leaning. Her husband is republican leaning. They both believe the middle class is getting destroyed by politicians for the last 2 decades. They are both retired. They used to be middle/low income. These days they are clearly low income.

      • In 2004, they both voted for Bush.
      • In 2008, they both voted for Obama.
      • In 2012, they both voted for Obama.
      • In 2016, they both claimed to vote for Trump, although I believe my aunt might have voted for Hillary. (Uncle has military background. He kept saying if he did what Hillary did when he was in active duty, he would be in prison for the rest of his life.)
      • In 2020, they both voted for Biden.

      For the last 2 years, they both are saying that they don’t want to vote for Trump but Biden destroyed the economy for middle class. It was clear they might give Biden another shot if he managed to recover the economy before the election.

      Ever since the debate, they both are dead set on voting for Trump. All I hear is “Of course the economy would be bad, he is senile.” or any “Of course xyz would be bad, he is senile.”

      As I said, I don’t care who you vote for. I care for the votes of people that have not decided whether to vote for Trump or Biden. In the debate, Biden lost a lot of them. Biden lost that debate, clearly! Saying “they both are senile” or “Trump lied during the debate” is damage control by Dems. If Dems insist on going forward with Biden, Trump will be president. I am sure of that.

      Now you can say my aunt and her family are stupid. You can say I am stupid for not changing their minds. You can say Trump is an insurrectionist and we are all stupid. You can even say all of the Americans are stupid, it is your first amendment right. You can down-vote me to hell if it makes you feel good. None of these will change the fact that my aunt and her family will vote for Trump unless Dems change the candidate or Biden manages to shit rainbows and use it to gift a million dollars to my aunt’s family.

      At this point being a Biden apologist is the same thing as voting for Trump. Trump will win.