My wife and I watched the Presidential debate last Thursday night, and it was obvious that President Biden lost. I rate his performance as a “D” because he at least completed the grueling ordeal. My impression was confirmed by watching the spinmeisters discuss the debate afterwards. Even the most die-hard Democrats admitted as much. It didn’t take words. Their faces told the story.
It was not that you could point to a blunder or two. President Biden looked and sounded weak and infirm. One Democratic commentator noted that there is only three years difference in their ages, but Trump looked and acted thirty years younger.
Joe Louis, one of boxings greatest champions, once said of an opponent that “he can run, but he can’t hide.” Well, President Biden may be running but he couldn’t hide during the debate. We finally saw the real Joe, or what was left of him at age 81. Finally, he stood alone without even Jill at his side, and we saw him without teleprompter or prepared remarks although he had spent a week preparing. It was sad, even sadder when you consider that he is the President of the United States.
President Biden’s deportment during the debate would make you think that we have not really had a President for the past three and a half years. I would go even further and say that he appears like a figurehead or puppet, and that during his term I suspect that the country has been run by a secret cabinet of non-elected Democratic bureaucrats and advisors working behind the scenes.
For three years Jill and the others in his inner circle must have observed that he was suffering from old age, and that he was no longer fit for the job. Along with a cooperative media, they have perpetrated a colossal fraud on us. They have hidden the real Joe from us but in the debate we could see and hear the truth with our own eyes and ears.
It is hard to believe that the professional politicians who run the Democratic party could have come up with the idea of this early debate. Sure, CNN would give Biden the home court advantage, and the moderators were friendly referees. Nevertheless, debate innovations like shutting off the mikes to prevent interruptions just worked to Trump’s advantage. It toned him down and allowed Biden to disgrace himself.
Speaking of Trump, I gave him only a C+ for the debate. He came off as strong and vigorous, and was good on inflation and immigration, but he missed too many opportunities to score. He belabored many points and often repeated himself, and when the moderators tossed him softballs like childcare, he could have hit them out of the park but let them pass. In a night with few memorable lines, he just threw away his best line. When he said something like, “I shouldn’t be here, I should be enjoying a good retirement at some resort, that I was not going to run again until I saw what a bad job Biden was doing,” that statement belonged in his final two-minute summation.
Speaking of grades, I would give an “A” to the two CNN moderators for the way they conducted themselves, and the debate. I thought their questions were fair and balanced, and especially liked the way they reminded the candidates that they had time remaining on the clock to expand on their remarks. I believe that the format should be a model for future debates.
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PS. By coincidence, I have been reading the letters of Junius, an eighteenth century critic of the British government on the eve of the American Revolution. In one passage he discussed the Duke of Bedford, an aging aristocrat and minister whose policies contributed to the American war and the eventual loss of the American colonies.
“ Let us consider you then, as arrived at the summit of worldly greatness; let us suppose that all your plans of avarice and ambition are accomplished, and your most sanguine wishes gratified… can age itself forget that you are now in the last act of life? Can gray hairs make folly venerable? And is there no period to be reserved for meditation and retirement? For shame, … let it not be recorded of you, that the latest moments of your life were dedicated to the same unworthy pursuits, the same busy agitations, in which your youth and manhood were exhausted. Consider that, although you cannot disgrace your former life, you are violating the character of age, and exposing the impotent imbecility, after you have lost the vigor, of the passions.”
