[Benjamin F. Alexander]

Biden’s per­for­mance in the Thurs­day night de­bate, June 27, was sad.  From the mo­ment he started speak­ing, he looked and sounded geri­atric.  Many times in the course of the evening, when he wasn’t speak­ing, he looked dis­ori­ented.  Es­pe­cially in the first seg­ment, his mouth was open a lot in a way that looked very awk­ward (and I’m sure some­body ad­vised him to close his mouth dur­ing the in­ter­mis­sion).  Now, you wouldn’t see much wrong if you just read the tran­script of what they said, be­cause his words them­selves were good, but the de­liv­ery was bad–se­ri­ously bad.

I should has­ten to add that Trump evaded nearly every ques­tion and made a ton of false claims.  When asked how he jus­ti­fied his ac­tions on Jan­u­ary 6, 2021, he re­sponded with a list of eco­nomic in­di­ca­tors that were fa­vor­able to him on Jan­u­ary 6, which of course was not the ques­tion.  But I don’t think Trump lost any sup­port­ers that night, be­cause noth­ing that he did told view­ers any­thing they didn’t al­ready know.  Biden, on the other hand, came off look­ing worse than he’s ever looked be­fore–bear­ing in mind that he did just fine in the State of the Union ad­dress ear­lier this year.

With the New York Times (a solidly De­mo­c­ra­tic, anti-Trump paper) run­ning an ed­i­to­r­ial the next day say­ing that Biden should step aside for the good of his coun­try, so that a stronger De­mo­c­ra­tic can­di­date can run in his place, I ask you all, if you feel like re­spond­ing:  Do you think Biden still has a chance of beat­ing Trump in this elec­tion?  (Feel free, if you so de­sire, to also add whether you think Ka­mala Har­ris could beat Trump if some­how she were to be­come the nom­i­nee.)