I DON'T WATCH "debates" because they're never really debates in the sense that the Lincoln Douglas debates were, you can read those online in many places, and you should. Presidential "debates" are TV spectacles that are not really about presenting issues, policies, the histories of the candidates, they are spectacles turning politics into show-biz. By the way, I don't watch Oxford style of Forensics team debating debates either because those are just spectacles of another kind. The truth isn't ever going to fit into a formatted show, I don't trust any of that.
The best performers in the world have bad nights, be they musicians or actors or sports figures. They have bad performances even during their prime when they are at their heights. As they get older those bad nights tend to come more often, especially if the performer and their advisors don't plan on how to avoid those.
Joe Biden has had more good nights at doing politics than just about any other politician in the country. Putting so much on a one-off "debate" was always a risk, one that was too big a risk for Biden and his advisors to have risked when the stakes are so high. But the reason they did it was because of the legendary stature that "debates" have gotten. When previous "debates" have turned into problems for candidates the ones who had the bad nights were all much younger than Joe Biden or Donald Trump, for that matter. So age isn't the foremost thing to consider, though it will be thanks to the New York Times and virtually all of the other media who have made Biden's age an issue and not Trump's. That Biden's first term is a virtuoso performance, with and without a Congress nominally in Democratic control, Trump's regime was a disaster in every single way, from economic corruption and incompetence, crimes against humanity, the murderous way in which he turned the Covid-19 pandemic into a Malthusian eugenics program as show biz strategy, none of that matters to our Republican-billionaire-millionaire controlled media.
Who knows how this is going to turn out, if there is another "debate" in September and it goes well, if Joe Biden has some major successes, if the Supreme Court doesn't distract people from the anti-Court wave that seems to be building, last night may not be much remembered.
I have also become extremely skeptical about the presidential system as opposed to a prime-ministerial form of government. The risks of putting all of democracies' prospects in a single figure have become enormous, they always were, especially under the putrid American Electoral College scheme, without which Trump would probably be the cancelled former "reality show" star whose latest trophy wife would have long ago divorced. He would probably not be facing the prospect of being in prison, despite continuing the crime wave his life has been.
That our "free press" has played the major role in bringing us to this and as CNN's refusal to fact-check Trump's lies (probably the greatest campaign donation he's gotten this month) proves how unreliable the media under the free-speech absolutist regime has become. No, how dangerous it has become, it is, itself, all-in on Trump, the sequel. I would never have trusted CNN the way the Biden campaign has, I'd have gone with the League of Women Voters, if they still exist. They were honest dealers in the past, CNN, the other cabloids, the networks, I wouldn't trust them any more than I would the NYT or WaPo.
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