The Terrible Debate
It’s So Joever. Or At Least, It Should Be
It is 2:00 AM. I have had several drinks. I am tired, and I am furiously angry.
I did not start this evening angry. I started it drinking an enormous frozen margarita at a swank Manhattan bar with some friends waiting for the debate to come on. I was nervous, yes, but hopeful.
And then, the debate began. Biden looked exhausted. One eye more open than the other. He kept looking down, which made it look like he was closing his eyes. Stumbling over his words, badly. He froze, at one point — four or five seconds of silence.
But then, things seemed to get better, at least from my perspective. Sure, I couldn’t really understand what Biden was saying, but my hearing is pretty shot and it was a loud bar so I figured he probably didn’t sound as bad as he sounded to me (turns out he sounded worse: because I couldn’t entirely make out what he was saying, I missed how often he tripped over words and fumbled over facts). Sure, he was missing a lot of opportunities to hit back at Trump, but he was more or less coherent. He wasn’t freezing up. His mix-ups were relatively minor. Sure, Trump was giving the best debate performance of his political career (a very low bar), but this wasn’t catastrophic. Biden’s performance was so much better than I was expecting.
