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If you noticed a glow on the horizon Thursday night, it was cell phone towers set ablaze by Democratic leaders frantically calling one another. They were in full freakout mode after their party’s impending presidential nominee spent two hours looking positively baffled and befuddled before millions of Americans on live TV.
Witness Drudge Report’s headline posted before the encounter was even over: “Operation: Replace Biden; Debate Catastrophe.”
The highly anticipated showdown between Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump was, in one sense (a very technical sense) a draw. There was no Reagan-esque “there you go again!” knockout blow, no single, memorable moment that was an instant game changer. Also, no new policy initiatives were offered from either candidate – and Trump didn’t tip his vice presidential hand, as many expected he might.
None of that mattered, though. Because presidential debates aren’t scored by a panel of three judges the way college and high school debates are. They are scored by a small (and ever-shrinking) segment of the electorate which hasn’t made up its mind – and whose criteria for doing so are (usually) maddeningly elusive for pundits and pollsters. Accordingly, it’s not a question of which candidate made and defended his positions better than the other guy. Rather, these “debates” are like extended Q&A sessions for the most important job interview on the planet. Meaning it is more than a candidate’s answers; it’s his appearance, his demeanor, and his overall vibe that determines who “wins.”
And that was where Biden blew it. Big time.
***
Appearances matter. Or as the tennis star Andre Agassi once famously said, “image is everything.” Unfortunately for Biden, his appearance – and the image he projected – was that of a politician in need of being put out to pasture.
First, Biden shuffled onto the stage looking like Tim Conway’s old man character on the “Carol Burnett Show.” Conway died five years ago, incidentally. Under the lights, the president looked awful: waxy and wan, almost as if he’d been teleported from a display at Madame Tussauds.
Next there was his voice. Soft and raspy, like a lounge singer who’d had one too many cigarettes before the show. (Team Biden tried to explain it away by saying he had a cold. Though reporters noted the White House didn’t say anything before the event about the president feeling under the weather.) His volume level throughout the evening was little better than a mumble.
Plus, Biden was slow, halting, hesitant – frequently pausing to grope for the right word. He reminded some of Ronald Reagan during his first debate with Walter Mondale in 1984. The Gipper had been so over-prepared with facts and figures that he had trouble recalling them – and it showed. Ditto for Biden this time around.
Yet bad as all of that was, it paled in comparison to what followed.
***
Biden lost the debate about twelve minutes or so into the exchange. Answering a question about the border debacle and illegal immigration, he began by touting his bipartisan immigration measure and his recent executive order … only to then melt into a blur of incoherence.
“I’m going to continue to move until we get to total ban — on the total initiative relative to what we’re going to do with more border patrol and more asylum officers,” he said.
Huh?
Trump’s response was devastatingly succinct: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”
Partisan loyalties aside, most Americans saw in Biden a leader who waged a two-hour battle – not against Trump, but rather against his own inability to master the moment (and his mental faculties).
Biden lost both of those battles. Decisively.
***
Needless to say, the drugs didn't work. pic.twitter.com/3lYHnU476w
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) June 28, 2024
***
Conversely, Trump displayed two advantages: he brought energy and passion, and he was lucid. Viewers may not have agreed with what he said … or trusted his claims … but at least they could understand him.
At least they could see a mind at work as opposed to a mind in decline.
True, Trump was his usual salesman self, pitching the years 2017 to 2021 as a Golden Age for America – one swiftly replaced by a New Dark Age imposed by his successor. He can restore the magic, he promised; all it takes is another four-year lease on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The former president also played fast and loose with certain facts at times – or all the time, according to his detractors. But even there, Biden gave his opponent a hall pass by repeatedly saying things like “liar” and “lying” so often it turned off a chunk of viewers.
Both men also devolved into moments that were beneath the dignity of the office. Such as toward the end, when they got into a snarky spat over who had the better golf handicap. When many Americans practically have to take out a bank loan just to go grocery shopping or pay their utility bills, does anyone really give a damn about either president’s golf swing?
***
One of the biggest surprises of the night was the more-or-less even-handed performance by CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. True, they played all the Democrats’ greatest hits, from climate change to the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. However, even when Trump was asked about the latter incident, the Democrats’ favorite pet word, “insurrection,” wasn’t mentioned. It was as close to a level playing field as a Republican could have hoped for.
Two things made Thursday night stand out from the run-of-the-mill presidential debates we’ve seen every four years since 1976. For the first time since the original Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960, there was no studio audience. Just two candidates and two moderators. It was refreshing to watch them focus on each other instead of the folks seated behind the cameras. And there were two commercial breaks, too. One would love to have seen how Trump and Biden reacted to each other while the ads played.
When all was said and done, those who already supported Trump saw a clear and unambiguous “winner” – while Biden loyalists faithfully gave the ‘W’ to their guy. But that’s not why Democrats were in such a terrified – and public – frenzy. They realized independent swing voters, the handful of people who will likely decide the election in November, were asking themselves, “If he looks this bad now, how’s he going to look when he’s 86 at the end of a second term?”
Democrats have good reason to be concerned on that front.
Opinion and polling guru Frank Luntz tweeted during the debate’s first hour that his panel of independent voters was “now beginning to switch and choose … and it’s not going well for Joe Biden.”
***
Who will @TheDemocrats draft to replace @JoeBiden?
— FITSNews (@fitsnews) June 28, 2024
***
“My focus group of undecided voters wants Joe Biden to step aside,” he wrote on X at the end of the debate. “They like him and respect him – most voted for him in 2020. But they want him to go. Tonight was a political earthquake.”
Liberal commentator Sara Spector summed it up the seismic impact of that earthquake perfectly.
“Tonight is the night the Democratic Party needs a come to Jesus moment … I can’t defend Biden if Biden can’t,” she said.
“I love Joe,” she added. “He can’t beat Trump. I’m sorry.”
That sentiment, or something very similar to it, ricocheted off all those cell phone towers with the speed of a meteor shower when the debate had ended. Democrats scrambled to come up with their next move following Biden’s big disaster in Atlanta.
Conventional wisdom agrees on at least one thing: Although a second Biden-Trump encounter is already booked for September 10, 2024 on ABC, “this is gonna be the only debate of the 2024 cycle,” reporter Andrew Desiderio wrote on X.
No argument there, Andrew.
***
ABOUT THE AUTHOR …
J. Mark Powell is an award-winning former TV journalist, government communications veteran, and a political consultant. He is also an author and an avid Civil War enthusiast. Got a tip or a story idea for Mark? Email him at mark@fitsnews.com.
***
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19 comments
Amazingly quiet from the libleft this morning…
lol
Biden got a bump in the polls after the “disaster”.
Old man with cold beats a lying, rapist, fraudulent felon with real Americans ;-)
Voting for president is like being forced to choose between cancer and AIDS.
We have a self righteous liar who takes credit for making the sun shine each morning vs. Weekend at Bernie’s.
Funniest thing I’ve read this morning!
Sleepy Joe must have not drank enought of the Kool Aid /Juice before the show began. Then again Hunter forgot to show up with the goods this time. So all the Democrats got to see the true Shit Show Joe in all his mumbling bumbling glory. Were there really cannibals back stage? Only time will tell but I doubt Brandon is going to be on the ticket and will be replaced.
I weep for our country. It was like watching an aged but still reasonably sharp Andrew Dice Clay debating an animated wax cadaver-robot from the Disney World’s Hall of Presidents attraction….who has the access codes to a nuclear arsenal.
Biden vs. Trump, there is still no doubt in my mind. I will never vote for the man who says he wants to be a dictator, who caused the invasion of our capitol, who spent 90 minutes last night spewing lie after lie and answering no questions of substance, choosing time after time to evade the question and double down on his oft-repeated lies.
But Trump did make headlines in my opinion. He did not deny that if elected he would take the US out of NATO and turn Ukraine and Eastern Europe over to the Russians, and he did not deny he called our fallen heroes, losers, and suckers. Both disqualifying for me.
As for Biden, bad performance no doubt. But he has surrounded himself with honest competent people, and if push comes to shove he can get the job done, and the Russians and Chinese do respect him. First, his administration is almost single-handedly responsible for reinvigorating NATO to fight Russian aggression and making it more united and more powerful than it has been in fifty years. The NATO allies Trust us under Biden and will accept we are not their ally under Trump. We will become Russia’s ally.
Second, Biden is the first President to say openly we will defend Taiwan if China attacks. Trump would never do that. He would simply say, that oceans separate us and would abandon our Asian allies to the Chinese as he would abandon our European allies to the Russians.
Russia and China have zero respect for Trump, who they see as easily manipulated by flattery, and whose lust for wealth and power makes him eminently bribable, and I agree with that assessment.
Biden lied his ass off all night (when you could figure out what he was trying to say). From the 1,000 trillionaires to the death of Beau, to Trump’s statements and positions on NATO (which you are lying about), to Roe v Wade, to J6 (which the witch has now admitted to her culpability). Helped about the cages (that he and Obama put in place), he lied about taxes, the deaths of soldiers in his disastrous Afghanistan pull out. The Border Patrol Union called his lies out before the he could even move on to his next lie/half truth.
Trump is full of bovine excreta as well but between, non sequiturs, word salad, unintelligible comments and flat out lies, Biden didn’t say anything of consequence in the hour and a half that disastrous dumpster fire took to unfold.
No one is lying about Trump’s position on NATO. Trump wanted to pull us out of NATO in his last term and planned to pull out of NATO if he won the 2020 election. In fact, he said to people in his administration, “We will get to that next term.”
The only thing that could stand between him and taking us out of NATO is Congress, and if it’s a Republican Congress we can forget that. The Republicans were so afraid of what Trump would do for Russia in his last administration, that they put laws in place to prevent him from reducing sanctions on Russia and pulling us out of NATO. But those guys are gone and there will be no will to stop der Führer this time. When Biden said Trump would pull us out of NATO, Trump did not deny it. Instead, he made a facial gesture that can only be interpreted as Yeah, so what? The Europeans know they cannot rely on America for help if Trump is President. They are already discussing what NATO will be after another Trump term. MAGA will be happy. They are too stupid to understand, the ramifications of a Russian-dominated Europe and a Chinese-dominated Asia. But if Trump wins that is exactly what we will see.
France and Britain will have to give nukes to or station nukes in the stable democracies, so that will probably deter Russia from going into Western Europe and Northern Europe, but Eastern Europe is toast. They will all be vessel states to Russia, again.
Biden, lied very little last night and what you would call lies is a matter of opinion. I would be happy to count lies by the two. Trump was nothing but a stream of lies, that he has told over and over. And yes, he called our fallen heroes losers and suckers; Yes, he insulted those buried at Arlington, essentially calling them fools; and Yes, no member of the Trump family has ever served in the armed forces of this nation. Trump as commander-in-chief is a disgrace to the nation and a piss on the grave of our war dead.
What are you talking about? Pelosi said she accepted responsibility for security failures, but Trump caused January 6 to happen. I don’t think Pelosi or most politicians believed Americans would attack our Capitol, though I certainly thought MAGA would, and they should have. But Trump incited that attack. He wanted it to happen, he fully expected people would be killed, and he fully expected it would cause him to retain power. He refused to stop it and he encouraged his followers to hang Mike Pence while the attack was in process. It was Pelosi and her people who finally got Maryland and Virginia to send the National Guard, and Trump saying he offered the National Guard is a lie. Trump is an evil man, who believes political violence to achieve your goals is just fine. He tried to use it once and he will use it again as it suits him. Those people are traitors and fully deserve to be in jail.
He’s delusional
Funny that the Supreme Court seems to disagree with you… Had Pelosi deployed the guard, like she was requested to do (and they were on hand and ready) Jan 6th wouldn’t have happened. Is Trump complicit? Maybe but had Pelosi done her job we might have just had a BLM moment rather the the relatively peaceful debacle that took place.
“Had Pelosi deployed the guard, like she was requested to do (and they were on hand and ready) Jan 6th wouldn’t have happened.”
I wouldn’t have drunkenly punched that guy if he did a better job of stopping me!
lol… That’s a real “language of an abuser” thing to say. “It’s your fault! Why did you make me do this to you?” Great defense there buddy. That’s a real winner of a defense strategy, shame no one thought to use that in their court cases.
Relatively peaceful debacle? WTF! They were breaking down doors, beating policemen over the head with polls and bats, spraying them with bear spray, crushing them in door openings to the point one guy was begging for his life, breaking into the House Chamber with Zip Ties, building a gallows on the capitol grounds, and shouting “Hang Mike Pence.” Did you even watch what happened? I did. There was nothing peaceful about it. Talk about rewriting history. There were NO BLM people involved. This was all MAGA.
This is what TDS looks like.
Seems we were watching a totally different debate than you.
333 million people in the U.S., and this is the best that the two parties can come up with. There is something seriously wrong with the process, and just as importantly, with the people who allow it.
Sad ain’t it?
They don’t need a competent, coherent, and capable present. They need a rubber stamper, a “yes” man, a child that can be kept from sticking a fork in the electrical outlet by the daycare workers while the unelected men in suits all around him do the bidding of the rich and powerful. It’s better that a candidate barely functions because you can just push them aside and control things more directly.
I think the rich realize that, while an effective tool, the RNC has completely been given over to mental illness. Nikki Haley would have been a stellar rubber stamper, but that isn’t who the inmates in the asylum want representing them. Conversely the DNC always wants to “play it safe” with whoever they insist the public will want to vote for (which worked wonderfully for Hillary, huh?), and since Biden has incumbency they refuse to look for someone else.
All that matters at the end of the day is that America is molded into a form that benefits the super rich, and the middle class is held under the water in the bathtub until it stops twitching.