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I only listened to the debate for about ten minutes while I was in the car, and that was well over an hour into the debate, so I can't comment on most of it. But from what I did hear, while Biden definitely lacked energy, the actual substance of his responses was much better than Trump's. Trump repeatedly ducked questions, while Biden actually answered them. Not that Biden's performance was that great, but if you were to go off of the transcripts only it seemed about even. Of course, when I got back in the car well after the debate ended and had to listen to the NPR rundown they were sticking a fork in Biden, mainly based on the same things everyone here is criticizing him for, and it reminded me why I hate debates. It's all spectacle. Even when speaking strictly on matters of substance, I want a president who can make reasoned decisions after consultation with experts, not someone who can come up with answers on the fly. Like, yeah, there is some of that in the presidency, but very little, and almost all of it involves foreign policy emergencies where he'll at least get to consult with his advisers. But even that doesn't matter, because the superficial aspects are all anyone seems to care about.
As a follow-up to my comment to @SlowBoy, one of our Motters used the report feature on this comment to offer the following:
So, you know, if we're discussing whether or not the Motte is smarter than average and whether discourse here is better than diaper memes on Twitter, perhaps you can at least appreciate that the most rabid partisans have to mostly limit their venom to screaming at the void (and the mods). Is this an "incorrect understanding" of the debate? Or is it just preferring actual arguments to "Who scores the sickest burn"?
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His “substance” was “we have a program where we will spend x dollars on it.” It wasn’t about ideas or concepts. Sure it was more detailed compared to Trump I guess. But it wasn’t informative.
Yeah, there was no substance from either candidate.
"We will give you everything you want, and it won't cost you a dime. Under me, our country will be an amazing utopia, but under my opponent it will crumble to dust." Repeat ad nauseum.
If there was any take away about the issues it's this: Trump really seems to care about stopping immigration. No matter what the question, he immediately made a left turn to start talking about immigration.
I would reframe that. Trump really seemed to have picked up that a majority of voters seem to care about immigration.
I doubt he personally cares. But a leader who's at least able to identify and echo the wishes of the voters is still way ahead of one that cannot or will not.
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Yeah, that’s what I picked up on as well — he didn’t talk about doing things, he talked about programs, and the way he did seemed like he had only a vague idea of what those things actually did.
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Yeah, and that's why I was explicit about my framing of the debate in terms of what voters actually heard and felt. Now, maybe I didn't spend enough time on it, but I did mention that voters usually notice when candidates dodge questions, and that definitely applies to Trump. This didn't fly over anyone's head, and I don't mean to give that impression at all. They noticed.
A better debater than Biden would have had a field day. But what you see is what you got. And yes, the written readout of the debate looks much better for Biden, I noticed that in coverage too. So that might be a factor when it comes to spin -- surveys indicated that a very rough third of US adults were going to watch at least some of the debate, and another third would be tuning in to coverage after the fact. And Trump will probably (and, I think, correctly) get smashed in most fact-checks (but not all).
Re: your comment about substance, frankly that's what's annoying. I think Biden could actually run a very effective campaign if he leaned on the whole "I have good judgement and my cabinet does all the work, and the cabinet is full of professionals". I think voters would respect that! He had some great line about how 40 out of 44 past Trump cabinet members declined to endorse him. How is that argument not front and center? Hit Trump as an incompetent, broken record, rather than make him out to be a supervillain. Similarly, Trump has clearly been coasting on Biden's unpopularity.
I never understood why Hillary and the media didn't do more of this in 2016. The constant refrain was a monocle-dropping-into-wine stammering of "hE's unFIT for the Office Of the Prefidency! My wooorrrddddd"
Why not just go, "Yo. This dude is real dumb." again and again. It kind of worked against W. Bush.
How much more could they have possibly done? It didn't work then and it couldn't have worked, because Trump has the charisma of the funniest man in the room. The only people who would have been moved by a different Dem marketing campaign are the people who are moved by Dem marketing campaigns.
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It worked so well against W that he won and cruised easily to a second term.
A nitpick, but 2004 was no cruise. It wasn't as close as 2000, and CNNs attempt to claim that Ohio was still too close to call as of Wednesday morning was cope, but it really was the case that both ex ante (based on polls and fundamentals) and ex post (based on winning by a single state, where the result was 51-49) the election was unusually close.
Most incumbent Presidents who don't wreck the economy cruise to a second term. W held on by the skin of his teeth.
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Kind of. I think (I was a young teen not listening too closely so might be wrong) that they actually overplayed this against Bush, so allegedly when he showed up, people were surprised how (relatively) coherent he was when they heard him live, plus dinged Gore for being too elitist and arrogant. The beer test doesn't always reward the intellectual. I know that even being raised in a very liberal state myself, and hearing constantly how evil and stupid and bad he was, all the Bushisms and flubbed lines, but then watching some of his speeches later on, I also got the feeling "oh this dude doesn't seem so bad". Partly why my pet theory about Iraq is that Bush was a good person, maybe even kind of smart, but his main failing was he surrounded himself with the wrong people, and guys like Rove and especially Cheney led him far astray. And cognitive dissonance from Democrats who later pretended to be anti-war additionally dilutes the blame.
So I think more specifically than painting a candidate as dumb, it's better to paint them as a jerk or otherwise unlikeable. I.e. see if you can get them to fail the beer test. I know it's not that scientific, but I feel like it's a good barometer.
It's quite funny that the meme of Bush being actively stupid endured for so long. I was just watching a bit of one of the 2000 presidential debates and while not at the same level as Al Gore he was obviously a capable individual. Idiots don't become leaders of major nations.
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Really, Bush wasn't prepared to be a foreign policy president at all. He actually campaigned on comparative disengagement with foreign entanglements, after the perceived overreaching and mistakes of the Clinton forays into the Yugoslav wars, etc. He wanted to be the "education president" and to focus on things like entitlement reform...then 9/11 happened and upended everything.
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The thing is, I think people on the Motte are overall going to be more charitable to Biden than the average normie voter, even if we don’t like him. Because we have access to a much less tightly controlled info-space. We’ve probably all seen a bunch of compilations of his sentences turning into gibberish, or him talking about how he’s just met a world leader that’s been dead for twenty years, or having to be physically turned around at an event because he’s facing the wrong way. To us, his debate performance would seem about normal, better than average for him even. For most people it’s not like that. If you’re a not particularly plugged-in liberal, your only exposure to him is two State of the Union addresses that he was drilled on for months and read off a teleprompter, and carefully edited CNN clips of his best moments, where he seems quite bright and energetic. For those people, to see him in an unscripted environment and notice that he really does occasionally have trouble finishing his sentences, and sometimes loses his train of thought is very shocking and disturbing.
Do you really think people have higher exposure to positively-edited CNN clips, more so than negatively-edited TikTok clips? I don't think that's accurate at all. I think most people have seen more clips, and causal conversations with many conservatives not uncommonly turns up at least one reference to Biden losing it, in my personal experience, so I imagine that's similar for others in swing states.
Conservative voters are obviously more likely to have seen videos and discussion of Biden falling, freezing up, or talking incoherently (whether fairly edited or not). Liberal and swing voters, otoh, are much more likely to have only seen positive coverage, which is why they are currently freaking out about Biden’s performance.
I wonder how many of them are putting 2 and 2 together (ie the republicans said Biden was mentally unfit, the media told us they were lying, but Biden clearly is mentally unfit ergo the media was lying).
Sadly, I'm sure most will reach for a relief valve against cognitive dissonance; they'll claim it's a recent development. If anything, they might end up blaming conservatives because their unprincipled claims for years that Biden was unfit made them ignore his actual decline when it happened.
As someone who hasn’t been paying much attention, when did the mental decline happen then? Because Biden seems much more declined compared to 2020
Edit: this commenter suggests that it is in fact a relatively recent development https://www.themotte.org/post/1054/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/224758?context=8#context
I haven't seen a qualitative change in recent times, I've seen footage of unfocussness similar to the debate for the last 4 years, but I think they were rare episodes 4 years ago, and since the beginning of the year it's more like the baseline with rare instances of focus.
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Biden has been gaffe-prone his entire life. But I believe there's been an increasing chorus of voices talking about something adjacent to early stages of dementia starting around the beginning of this year. Sorry, no specific citations, just my general impression from listening to lots of news and pundits.
Whether Biden actually has dementia is an interesting question. I have known a number of elderly people through the entire dementia-related decline, in situations both very fast (like a year/18 months) and much slower, where the decline happened over more like a decade.
The way Biden speaks and acts during his muddled, confused phases like in the debate isn’t very similar to what I saw in those people. I know we have actual doctors here who probably have more experience with older patients with cognitive degeneration, but to my mind it doesn’t seem like dementia specifically. It almost seems like what happens when I’ve seen people on very powerful painkillers or downer drugs and they just kind of become incoherent. Dementia in the early stages often looks much more like very confident, almost angry restating of incorrect truths (“Stan is dead? Stop bullshitting me, I saw him yesterday for breakfast”), but not grammatically incorrect or mumbling or trailing off really, just memory loss.
Biden seems able to remember near-term facts to some degree, even if he sometimes muddles them up. But the sentence trailing and incoherency would typically come long after memory-related decline became MUCH more obvious and frequent than it currently is for Biden.
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What do you think about all of the breathless reporting about Democrat insiders losing their shit over this?
Are those people not plugged in or constantly hyper-consuming political information including full speech readouts, press releases, presidential daily schedules, Politico inside scoops etc?
For what it is worth he was worse last night than when I saw him speak live a few weeks ago. Illness, stress and lack of rest can exacerbate age related decline pretty quickly, I've seen it happen in literal days when I worked in social care. UTI's and cold/flu being the most usual culprits.
And if you actually have exposure to him it's possible he was coming across reasonably well in lower stress situations, with less time to have to speak. That plus bias towards your own side would do a lot of heavy lifting.
Most of my contacts are in British politics not American, but a couple of them actually met Biden fairly recently and were shocked to see the difference last night as well, which indicates that perhaps something did get worse in the immediate past.
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I think they thought they could hide his decline.
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I think a lot of them have fallen into the trap of believing their own propaganda, that Biden's apparent frailty and incoherence were merely Republican propaganda brought out by misconstruing events and taking clips out of context.
They did the same thing with Hillary Clinton; the Republicans swore she was ill, Democrats swore this was foul calumny, then Hillary collapsed at the 9/11 memorial. (Obviously her illness, whatever it was, was considerably less serious)
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I think those people have been in quite a lot of struggle sessions where the very suggestion that Biden might be a little bit over-the-hill is laughable Drumphist propaganda and if you humor that idea it’s a sign that you may be a dangerous racist sexist fascist who needs to be voted off the island. But now they have a moment where the conditioning is broken by intense public ridicule and the scales fall off.
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I largely agree, I didn't think it was that bad but the split screen was killer. Significant portions of the debate Biden was staring off (at the wrong cameral?) slack jawed with a blank look on his eyes while Trump did normal Trump faces. I don't know what view the CNN panel had and the other channel commentators but I think there was major social momentum around "panic" that swept through a lot of elite democratic circles in the first 30 minutes.
If they had circled the wagons it probably wouldn't have been so bad but you had Anderson Cooper asking Kamala Harris tough questions. Now tons of Democrat talking heads are on record saying this is a disaster, and if that keeps momentum in the elite circles Biden could come under pressure.
Man, Kamala Harris is so incredibly unlikeable on camera (I hear she's fine in person). But yeah, you know that in private, almost every Democrat is going to be thinking to themselves "why can't Biden just step aside like we all secretly want him to?" These thoughts don't come up unless they've been simmering for a while, and I think they have.
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Couldn't disagree more.
Debates aren't at all about substance because they're such a known formula at this point. The moderator will ask a question, but all a candidate has to do is correctly identify the broad subject ("the economy", "immigration", "abortion") and then just launch into their prepared talking points. That's it. That's how you avoid losing a debate. You win if you can build in some interesting rejoinders or somehow trap your opponent into saying something dumb. Obama's famous "proceed..." versus Romney was one of the better recent examples.
That Biden was so incoherent demonstrates that he isn't up to the most basic of pre-scripted tasks. You say he was better on substance. What was his uniting theme on the economy? To me it was "MedicareVeteransLikeHBCUGrantsAndHigherTaxes."
No one came into this expecting either candidate to blow the other one's doors off. Trump was pretty much a known quantity. There was some question about how much time he might spend on talking shit about his felony convictions. Biden was expected to be slightly spacey Democrat talking point machine. If both parties had done their basic job this would've been an (as expected) nothing burger.
But Biden didn't even show up. Because he couldn't. Because he's not there.
Trump's J6 answer (which one would have to assume was thought out well in advance, TBF) was legitimately great.
Blaming Pelosi and talking about a BLM riot double standard? It was pretty effective, at least. I was a bit distracted however by the near-explicit admission that he WAS, in fact, watching TV during the whole Capitol riot just like all the reporting said he was, contrary to many claims by his camp that he was doing other things and only found out later in the day that it was bad.
No, that part was fine too (although of undetermined truth value) -- his initial answer (before Tapper was like "hey, I meant the riots") was along the lines of this meme: https://i.imgflip.com/6irfby.jpg
"On Jan 6 I was still president, and (list of things) were going great!"
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That was a small part. But basically he was saying the US was better off.
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