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.
It’s amazing to me that “he sounds feeble” is worse than “everything he said wasn’t true.”
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.
This is exactly the issue. The bar was set so low. He was barely able to put together a coherent response to the infanticide claims, which was something even the lowest of information voters know is a lie. He let Trump walk all over him on immigration even though Biden put together a “bipartisan” plan that was just a Republican wishlist. If Biden had articulated any of that we’d probably be having a different conversion.
We know Trump is a liar.
Biden had to prove he wasn’t feeble… and he failed at that.
Voting for Biden and his administration is still 100% the correct decision, but that debate isn’t going to convince any swing voters. If you want to use the incumbency advantage you need to convince folks you can stay the course for the next 4 years.
WE know, and that’s why the debate wasn’t for us. And it was a bad idea from the start - Trump does not deserve to be in a debate. Not that there’s any debating going on.
It was always going to support the ticket that thrives on chaos and idiocy. Always.
Truth doesn’t really matter in a presidential debate, it’s not actually a debate. It’s all about appearing superior than your opponent.
Don’t you think he looks tired?
I always kind of hated that bit, because it seemed so unrealistic. And here we are.
Life imitates art.
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)
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.
I’d still 100% let them drive me instead of a sociopath conman.
It’s not about the diehard voters. It’s about the the undecided voters. Which presumes they’d be fine with either.
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.
Yes it is. But they’ve created an entirely different narrative to believe in.
It’s worse if you expect the first guy to be a strong contender against the second guy
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.
CNN is essentially owned by John Malone now. It’s just Fox News lite.
Are all American “debates” like this? The moderators just let them rattle off lies and skip the questions without challenging them?
Nope.
Up till this year a non partisan committee handled the debates and lent it an air of impartially and at least tried to hold candidates to the questions.
Both parties decided to boycott those debates, and set up their own with CNN as the host.
I’ve been bitching about it for months now and everyone’s been telling me it’ll be fine…
Edit:
2020 debates
Hard disagree. This wasn’t unusual. Presidential debates are notorious for moderators being ineffectual and unwilling to challenge lies.
I’ve never seen a debate where the moderators did a fact check. You’ll see candidates call each other out sometimes, but moderators don’t actually moderate. Timing answers to be ridiculously short so nothing of substance can be said is also a perennial feature.
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Lol last night before the debate started, I sent a message to my friends asking if it was too late to get Kyle Clark to moderate. The guy is amazing.
If all debates for like that one. I would not miss a single debate. He cut through the b******* and got straight to the answers or not answers as the case may be. Which is what a debate moderator should do. A debate moderator is not intended to be a personified a cue card. The Talking Heads at CNN failed even harder than I ever thought they could with their moderation.
Fact checkers challenged many of Trump’s statements. Trump falsely said that he “brought back (college) football”; as he had commented on his wish for the conferences to play, but took no official action. Trump also repeated the claim that he “got back” Seattle and Minneapolis from left-wing protesters, and continued to repeat conspiracy theories about voter fraud. He said, without evidence, that drug prices will fall “80 or 90 percent,” in reference to his efforts to cut drug prices[50] and exaggerated that he is making insulin at prices “so cheap, it’s like water”, despite insulin prices remaining fixed at about $300 per vial. Trump also misleadingly said that the U.S. economy before the pandemic was “the greatest economy in the history of our country”; although GDP growth was high in the first three years of the Trump presidency, it was higher under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Bill Clinton, and the unemployment rate was lower under Eisenhower.[51] Nominal GDP was higher than at any point in US history, but this is true for the large majority of US Presidencies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_debates#Format_and_debate
.
Those all happened afterwards. During the debate nobody has ever been told they lied about a particular thing by a moderator.
I hope you appreciate this, because I had to watch those two argue more:
Pretty much every Trump debate has been like this. This one was actually an improvement from 2020 and 2016 because his microphone was turned off so he wasn’t able to just yell over the other person and constantly interrupt.
I don’t know if this is an improvement. As many feared, the muted mic saved Trump from himself. I’m sure his staff was actually pretty excited about that rule.
It would prevent him from doing what he did last time, which polled terribly.
That’s very true, I should of said “from a civility standpoint it’s an improvement”.
Yes. 90% of the time is almost always off topic. Sometimes a candidate spends a whole sentence saying something related, but that’s as close to organized as it ever was.
Trump definitely does more personal attacks, but that’s about it. I’ve seen a moderator make a correcting statement once.
They’re getting much worse
They are now, apparently.
Oh absolutely. I meant only they weren’t so glaringly obvious, always.
I’m voting for Biden so don’t give me shit about being a Leftist helping Trump win. But if he does win, remember that Dems had a million chances to run someone better and this is what they let happen. It’ll be their fault if we get more of the bad man.
The dems suspended the primaries in a number of states and more or less coronated Biden.
The Dems believe in democracy only when against the GOP but do not believe in democracy when deciding matters inside their party.
The “Democratic” Party my ass cheeks. Clowns and hypocrites.
Agreed. The coordinated pullout to sabotage Bernie in 2020 was shameful. “Vote for us or you’ll be sorry when the GOP takes over” is all they offer.
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If they won’t change and they’ll just blame you when they loose why are you voting for them?
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Do you think it’s worth it to help the democrats win rather than build an alternative and show them where to shift their platform towards?
Build an alternative in… checks calendar, 4 months that can gain more votes than the active democratic nominee and beat the stir mad republican candidate whose supporters are voting for out of pure spite. This comment is either in bad faith or you literally have no idea how the election works. Best case here isn’t even winning, it’s taking as few votes from the sane candidates as possible because all this’ll do is split the democrat voting block.
That’s not feasible in a FPTP system. Best you can do is keep voting for the least bad between the two “real” candidates and shift the Overton window overtime.
Or have a violent revolution, but that’s a bit more difficult to coordinate.
History, procedure, common sense, and logic all said that was what was going to happen. They didn’t cancel the primaries. They never started the primaries. A lot of states started holding primaries assuming the incumbent wasn’t running again. But that was never the case. Biden never said that he was only going to run the one time and not again. People in his orbit discussed that he might do that. But that was nothing that he said or that they ever committed to.
You and I are welcome to believe this what he should have done. But historically if an incumbent decides to run for another Term. No party ever Has primaried them. We can criticize Biden on not telegraphing that well enough. That’s fair. We can absolutely criticized Biden on things like that. But policy-wise and as far as his administration goes. He’s been fairly popular and consequential. Despite the one really big issue which seems to be all people want to talk about ignoring the fascist in the room.
THANK YOU!!! MORE TRUMP WILL BE THE DIRECT RESULT OF DOGSHIT LEADERSHIP IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY!
Are you a leftist that denies that there is a genocide going on in Gaza?
No. I’m a Leftist who’s outraged that my government is funding said genocide while actively denying it’s happening.
Then how could you possibly vote for Biden? He only once held up funding, for like two days, before the heat got too high for him and he relented. He’s marginally than Trump better but voting for him is still supporting genocide.
I mean, the Biden camp didn’t need to take this debate.
I don’t know the details for how far ahead all the rules were decided. I would have assumed months but clearly not.
A BIG news story yesterday was that republicans were angry that there would be live fact checking during the debate. So CNN got rid of that literally the afternoon of the debate. That makes a massive difference because it means that Biden now needed to actively refute the increasingly blatant lies in addition to getting his talking points across.
And the format always went against Biden. His stutter and aphasia do not mix well with short 3 minute responses. With proper debate prep and a focus on talking points, he is mostly good. We had a few moments but even when he was at his most feeble sounding he was fine. But once he had to respond to things like “you are a manchurian candidate” and “you are basically a Palestinian but a bad one”? Then it becomes “okay, call this prick the c-word. Now I need to also cite this fact that is part of my border security answer. And then I need to talk about… jesus christ are we actually talking about global warming right now?”
And that fucked Biden. Because that is not something a POTUS needs to be able to handle. If Kim Jong Un started talking like that during a meeting… we might literally invade North Korea. Almost all meaningful conversation between world leaders is basically heavily scripted speeches or closed door conversations where people acknowledge others are human.
But also? CNN didn’t even follow their own format. They repeatedly unmuted candidates (mostly trump but a few times Biden) so they could get a juicy comeback in.
Then it becomes “okay, call this prick the c-word. Now I need to also cite this fact that is part of my border security answer. And then I need to talk about… jesus christ are we actually talking about global warming right now?”
That would be an understandable reaction from the average person but the president should be a lot more capable than the average person. Even if this specific sort of thing isn’t something he needs to be able to handle, he still needs to handle things a lot harder than this and his performance here isn’t reassuring me that he can. Trump is so predictably rude that Biden should have been totally ready for it.
Nobody has, to my knowledge, ever faulted Biden in a crisis (… well, except the zionism and racism but those are carefully considered platforms and not knee jerk reactions). I know I get a stutter when I need to say a LOT of technical jargon in a row and others have the same issue. When your goal is to get shit done, rather than to clown on someone, people are a lot more able to understand what is being said and will ask for clarification where needed.
It does not matter. If I have trouble saying something then the person I am talking to can immediately key in on “foo?” and I can nod and move on.
It has absolutely zero bearing on leadership unless a bunch of terrorists have taken a building hostage and will kill one person every time Biden stutters while going through an actor’s warm-up exercises. And if Biden hadn’t gone up there sounding like he was dead this would not be an issue outside of the most chuddy of morons and useful idiots.
The problem is that he had all the same stutters and aphasias he has had for decades but ALSO sounded feeble.
People having the metric of “President sounds good when throwing schoolyard insults at people” is how we got less than half of the country voting for the orange fuckstick.
I mean. Sure I guess?
So it was unfair. Sure.
But Biden and his camp didn’t need to agree to a debate. It was going to get them nothing. There was NOTHING to gain here and everything to lose.
And they lost… everything .
It shows that the Biden team isn’t capable of manging this election; it showed that Biden isn’t capable of offering the rhetoric it takes to win.
The Presidential role is a communications job. If he can’t do the communications part of this, he__cant__win.
It is always worth remembering. During one of (their last?) debates in 2020, trump made a comment that Biden took as an attack on Beau (it was actually Hunter). Biden went fucking ballistic and trump visibly cowered. That basically destroyed the strong man routine instantly and shut everyone up about “Biden is weak”. Another moment like that would have almost guaranteed a win.
But also? Biden is a traditional politician who believes that there should be a debate so that people can make informed decisions. So the usual Democrat bullshit of trying to play by the rules.
But ALSO: If Biden had refused then the news cycle would be nothing but “Biden is a coward” and “Biden is weak”.
There was no winning. But if there had been fact checking and the rules were even kind of adhered to and Biden hadn’t drank a bottle of Nyquil or whatever the fuck happened there? It would have been good. Hell, even just one of those would have probably led to a decisive win.
They absolutely needed to. Biden can’t hide behind Covid protocol this time, he needs to be publicly visible far more in this campaign. Also whether it was mutual or not, Trump would use no debates as an attack against Biden.
I see both sides of what you are saying; but if this is what you get when you put the guy on stage?
Bro keep him under a rock. Its just much much more evidence that Biden can-not-be the candidate if we need to win this one.
If he was going to be that bad the democratic party shouldn’t have fought having a real primary.
If Biden faced a serious primary, we’d have known he was like this months ago and had even more time to find a competent replacement.
But people said it was too late then.
They say it’s too late now, but it still isn’t.
It’s too big of a risk to keep plowing ahead like we’re headed to Country Kitchen Buffet…
You overestimate the risk of this specific event. I do think the DNC and all Americans need a wakeup call before November and this may or may not be it, but the debate is forgettable in 1 week whereas the consequences of these Supreme Court decisions or going to be with us for years to come.
Democrats have other opportunities to energize their base, it’s up to them to use these opportunities, and avoid letting Trump dominate every election conversation.
You overestimate the risk of this specific event
This isn’t a one off thing tho.
This is Biden. He’s not going to magically change a bunch of policy positions to align with the Dem platform out of nowhere.
He’s not going to magically start acting half his age on the campaign trail.
No malarkey, what you see is what you get.
Now it really is too late. It’s Biden or Trump. Your either for democracy or fascism
Now it really is too late.
The convention still hasn’t happened.
The candidate still hasn’t been named.
It’s still not too late
Despite what people on Lemmy are saying there was a primary. Votes were cast and delegates are obligated to vote accordingly at least on the first ballot. Short of Biden stepping down there is no avenue to replace him at the convention.
Yeah, how politics and voting are supposed to work and how they actually do are 2 different things.
So you understand that it’s not too late?
Because this isn’t a thing where opinions come into play.
It’s literally not to late to change candidates. That’s just literal facts.
Why?
Because trump is guaranteed going to convince the military and entire government to behave like nazi Germany. Anyone who disagrees with this obvious take is clearly a moron who loves fascism and hates freedom. Trump will kill everyone who isn’t purely white. It’s so obvious. It’s definitely better to have a turtle without a shell as president because trump is the biblical antichrist who will surely usher in the end times. Only an idiot couldn’t see this obvious fact.
Someone educated can correct me but that doesn’t sound accurate. Even if it Trump were to go full hitler (which is dumb for an aspiring autocrat in this day and age) it wouldn’t work like that. They’d denigrate all non whites but have a specific target group that they persecute/kill. The group needs to be specific for fascism so they can have a sacrificial goat to blame everything on.
The real answer is he will continue the gutting of the administrative state. The direction we are going is corporatism. Absolution of federal agencies tasked with legally protecting people (education, health, environmental protection, labor protection, safety, finance regulation) and expanding the agencies that legally bind people (police, prisons).
It’s not likely that Trump would be going “full Hitler”. But the governors of Texas and Florida might.
Oh yeah for sure, that sounds way more likely my reply is more in following with the other posters “Trump will go full Nazi” hypothesis. Just seems like fascism has a specific way of working that’s more complex than “kill every out group”.
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Yeah he will kill everyone who spoke poorly of him, that includes everyone here.
No, it’s not too late. The convention is still 2 months out
Sure kid.
People need to chill the fuck out.
Do any of you remember the first debate between Kerry and W? W sounded and stammered like a compete moron, and it made no difference.
These debates are a waste of time and Biden should never have agreed to debate a traitor.
Yes, exactly. Only now we’ve punched ourself in the nads and have to walk it off when there should never have been this issue.
When have any of these debates in the past twenty years been “fair”? The democrats knew what they were getting into.
IMHO, complaining about the refs feels like grasping for straws.
Biden was rambling, incoherent, and unlike Trump, he couldn’t get on message. And the messaging against Trump ain’t complex. He wants fascism, he’s killing women, covid was a fucking disaster under him, he’s a felon, and he’s lying. Biden struggled to get the basics out in a clear and coherent way.
IMHO, this is NOT the time to keep on and carry on. This debate is early enough that he can still step down and we can have a contested convention. The alternative is fascism. Biden is going to lose this shit.
Why doesn’t he just answer every question with:
“Yeah but this is the man who thought shooting up bleach and letting sunlight into your lungs would cure COVID and then said it on TV”
He could also have ended all of his answers with “I’ll hand this back over to the convicted felon.”
Here’s the catch: we might expect that, or think that or want that, but “that” isn’t going to happen unless Biden wants that because the world of politics has its own laws just like every other discipline / industry.
I seriously doubt there’s any chance of it, but since we’re allotted this specific window to pretend we can choose such a thing, why not. I’d go for Bernie, or Warren, or Schiff, or a few others.
Sunday, ten years too late, they’ll send talking heads to the old-people political shows to vigorously support Biden, or the “new” messaging or whatever their mitigation strategy is. But for now, just today, sure let’s imagine.
Brandon fucked up. Bad. He played into all that bullshit the traitors have been planning. It was truly disheartening.
Look, I’m voting for him. I’ll vote for any D in hopes of stopping the republican traitor filth. But Brandon needs to fuck off. Someone needs to talk sense to him and have him recognize what is right and necessary for the country.
I guarantee you the subset of DNC operatives invested in keeping Biden is vastly larger than any advocating for someone else.
This is all media turd circus because we were stupid enough to stand in the same room with a demented orange rapist in order to, uh, “reach undecideds”.
Welp. We reached ‘em. Good job DNC. As per.
If they stand by him while the media eviscerates him then Trump wins, full stop.
If they want to fight this off he needs to be on national TV as often as possible over the next couple weeks answering questions without scripts or prompters. It’s the only way out of this hole.
If he will not or can not do that, he must step aside.
I dunno about that, but however we defeat trump let’s keep it in full focus because the roller coaster has begun its ascent in earnest.
Don’t let the optimism here fool you. Biden needs to bring on board undecided voters. And they aren’t impressed.
Honestly I think anyone who is old enough to vote and saw the unholy shitshow that was 2017-2021 is literally incapable of being undecided.
If that is even possible somehow, I’m sure there’s nothing Biden can do that will specifically change that.
Polls show there’s still undecided people. For example in Pennsylvania there’s 6 points unaccounted for in polling. And Biden really needs to pick up those points.
Polls show a lot of things. They are very often critically flawed.
Salon always has a bias, but I also can’t help but think he was on Sudafed or something. I also have seen him at other things and he’s generally less… raspy. Doesn’t change that it was stupid to go on like that, though.
I fortunately skipped the debate and only watched highlights, though. I already hate “debates” as far as I remember since, at best, it’s just fluffy sound bites and vague promises, and at worst, a series of unrefuted lies. This sounds like everything I hate about typical “debates” turned up to 11.
As it was always going to be.
DNC, get this through your heads: Debates Are Dead. They were getting pretty useless in an always-on world anyway, but Trump killed them dead.
Agreeing to these means you haven’t learned the lessons he already taught you. Put him in prison, not on tv.
He was massively over coached.
The very first thing he needed to say was:
“This man is going to lie to you. He’s going to lie the entire time, and probably the only thing he will say true is his name.”
Whoever decided that putting that old man on stage in front of a national audience was a good idea should be shot. I’m voting for Kamala Harris, via Biden.
Someone pointed out, the debate was scheduled for 9pm, with two men over 70. I’m in my 50’s, and I’m no good after 8pm. This should have been held in the morning.
The debate was poorly arranged, and once again Biden’s incompetent staff contributed by letting it happen.
Fair enough, but isn’t it reasonable to want the president of the United States to be someone who doesn’t fall apart after 9pm?
I remember Clinton’s “3am phone call” ad that she used against Obama. Now centrists are fine with “not after Wheel of Fortune.”
It’s too late to ask for that now. You gotta say that at the primaries.
I tried, the establishment muscled out any real contenders.
Another case of the lesser of two evils. I’m not necessarily hyped on Biden but holy shit he has never looked/sounded this old and feeble
