We Hear There Was A Debate Last Night

We're still with the guy who had a crappy debate but is good at presidenting.

If you didn’t watch last night’s teevee debate between President Joe Biden and Former President 34 Count Convicted Felon Adjudicated Sexual Assaulter and Business Frauder We’ll Stop There But Could Go On Donald Trump, you’ve probably heard about it by now.

Either way, you undoubtedly know that, putting it kindly, Biden’s debate performance started out pretty awful and then improved to only mildly awful, with a few actually good moments but not enough. Depending on what news you ingest, you may also have heard that Donald Trump started out with a lot of lies and fearmongering, and somehow managed to get far, far, worse. He knew he could get away with it, because Trump has worked enough in TV and politics to know that all the news coverage would be about Biden’s gaffes and verbal stumbles, so why not just lie as outrageously and rapidly as possible? Nobody who matters to Trump would care, although nerds might be tempted to rename the Gish Gallop.

You do not under any circumstances have to hand anything to Trump, especially not if you want it back, but yes indeedy, the media reaction has been 99.8 percent Is Joe Too Old and Feeble to Remain President, Let Alone Have a Second Term? — generally followed by also, Trump sure lied a lot, as is his habit.

So let’s take a look at this mess, while keeping in mind that there are four and a half months to go before the election, and that that President Mondale, President Kerry, and President Romney all vaulted into office after their opponents had terrible first-debate performances and nothing else happened the rest of the campaign.

There’s simply no getting around how, for much of the first half hour of the debate, Biden sounded terrible, and not only because he had a cold. He rambled, meandered, and like Barack Obama in his first debate against Mitt Romney, was obviously over-briefed trying to cram too much stuff into his answers with no apparent organization. He sounded old, and that wasn’t what he needed to sound like last night.

Worse, he flubbed moments where he should have been able to destroy Trump, especially early on, like when Trump lied that every legal scholar and leader of every political stripe agreed that Roe v. Wade was terrible and had to be overturned and he returned the issue to the states, where everyone agreed it should be — even the Founders, if they had known about abortion in those days. Biden did manage to call hooey on that last, but he missed the opportunity to actually get into just how horrible many states have been in denying healthcare to women who need it.

Instead, Biden started with a good point, that we don’t leave civil rights up to states to decide, but then, while trying to get at the point that victims of rape have little recourse in some states, confused the issue, rambling, and making a weird reference to a woman murdered by an immigrant, opening a door that Trump barreled through with all the lies and fearmongering he could muster.

On climate, an issue that should have been an easy layup because he’s done so much, Biden dismissed Trump’s nonsense claim about how America never had such clean air and water before him, then started to talk about his own climate plan, but then got sidetracked again.

Biden got a bit better as the debate progressed, with that memorable line about Trump having the “morals of an alley cat,” and giving a perfectly clear explanation of why NATO matters. He managed to throw Trump off his game by calling him a “whiner” who refused to say he’ll accept the outcome of the election, but that came too late, just before the final commercial break.

Thing is, it worked, just far too late. After the break, Trump was clearly rattled, and his closing statement was confused and snippy, as he tried to turn back the insult on Biden with “this man is just a complainer,” and you have to wonder how the debate might have gone if Biden had focused less on trying to toss policy nuggets all over and had instead concentrated on pushing Trump’s emotional buttons from the start.

If the second scheduled debate in September actually goes forward — Trump may blow it off, as many thought he might the first — we’re betting that Biden’s debate prep will involve more strategic efforts to hit Trump’s ego. Call him a loser in the first 15 minutes, maybe.

As for Trump, the man started with lies and simply ramped up their frequency and outrageousness as the night progressed, from the familiar bullshit about allowing post-birth abortions, to the bizarre, repeated lie that not only hadn’t he called fallen troops “suckers” and “losers,” but that Joe Biden had personally made it all up, a completely unhinged lie that of course the CNN moderators didn’t bother correcting, just like all the others.

Trump didn’t just lie a lot; by halfway through the debate, he was simply ignoring the moderators’ questions altogether, even when they pointedly reminded him that he hadn’t addressed them. And even then, Trump continued lying and fearmongering, at one point claiming that “hundreds of thousands” of Americans have been murdered by undocumented immigrants. Not gonna look it up, but I believe that was in “response” to a question about how he would help people find affordable daycare, or something equally unrelated to migrants coming out of the pavement and killing you.

And here’s where we close by reassuring you: Joe had a crappy debate night, and we don’t need to make excuses for it, because it was in fact only a debate, in June, and while his flubs will reignite all the media age discourse, most voters are already decided on who they’ll vote for. As MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell observed following the debate, Biden has always been better at governing than at communicating. Nothing Trump said was true, and for all his lies, Trump never actually criticized Biden about any thing that’s true. And no matter what, Trump remains a convicted felon.

It was a crappy night for Joe Biden, and it probably won’t matter in the big picture.

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