...some people who listened to the radio in 1960 thought Richard Nixon won the presidential debate with John F. Kennedy, then maybe people reading the transcript of Thursday night’s match-up would think President Biden won.
Maybe.
But elections aren’t won in transcripts. The reality is, fairly or not, debates are often about optics — how the candidates present themselves, defend their records and parry attacks.
And that’s why so many Democrats are ringing the fire alarms after the first general-election presidential debate of 2024. The Biden campaign said the president had a cold [45 mins into the debate, long after it was clear he had been trounced] to explain why he sounded so hoarse and weak. But Biden’s stumbles right from the beginning played into his biggest vulnerability — his age and whether the 81-year-old is up to the challenge of handling four more years in office.
Not much has changed the dynamics of this race; will anything that happened Thursday night make a difference either?
[I wrote before the debate that this cake is baked, that the race is Trump's to lose; that it wouldn't change many, if any, minds. The president, however, presented as so frail, so aged, so weak in both mind and body, that I predict he will emerge from this hole to find himself in a deeper hole.]
1. First and foremost, let’s talk about the elephant in the room – Democrats have to be wondering if they’d be better off with someone else as their nominee. (emphasis in original)
...it’s next to impossible that Democrats would replace Biden.
... he delivered the kind of performance Democrats feared, party leaders, strategists and many voters, frankly, had to be wondering during this debate what it would be like if any of a handful of other Democrats were standing on that stage.
... Biden often wasn’t able to show vigor or consistently convey what he wanted to say.
“Sometimes the spin don’t spin,” one Democratic strategist texted midway through the debate when asked for reaction.
2. If how Biden sounded wasn’t bad enough, the visuals might have been equally as bad.
...what people saw — and this was predictable — was a split screen.
Biden...looked genuinely shocked and confused, which is never a good look.
[He did. And it was a bad look, standing there gaping with his mouth open.]
...
3. The format — and hands-off moderators — benefited Trump.
The muting of the candidates was likely intended to make the debate calmer and not allow Trump to run roughshod over the moderators or his opponent. But it had the effect of making Trump seem more sedate than usual.
[I hadn't thought of that. I was impressed with how Trump presented, it was hard to see the bogeyman.]
The moderation, or lack thereof, also allowed Trump to spread falsehoods and hyperbole without being interrupted or corrected. CNN indicated before the debate that the moderators were not going to play a strong role in fact checking the candidates, and they lived up to that.
They left it to the candidates, essentially, and with Biden unable to deliver in real time and the moderators declining to, the audience was left with a salad bowl full of rotten eggs and moldy lettuce that passed for facts.
[That's a good point. Is it the moderators' job to fact-check? I don't think so. Has it ever been? Not that I recall. It is up the the opposing candidate, and the president was "unable to deliver in real time". Biden did say once that I saw, "Everything he just said were lies".]
Trump employed rounds of verbal jujitsu, in which he threw back his own vulnerabilities and directed them toward Biden.
4. This debate might not move the needle much, if at all.
Despite Biden’s struggles, which will understandably get the headlines, Trump had some difficult moments, too, especially in the second half of the debate.
In addition to spreading myriad falsehoods, he did little to credibly defend his conduct on and before the Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol; he used the kind of hyperbolic and vituperative language that has long turned off swing voters;...
So despite Biden’s shortcomings, millions will still likely vote for Biden, anyway, because he’s not Trump.
[Mike Miller spoke succinctly for anti-Trump Republicans and Democrats: "So, I will be voting for President Biden, but this was a disaster."]
The bottom line is: Americans have said they are unhappy with their choices, and, in this – the biggest moment of the 2024 presidential campaign yet — it was clear why.
