Doesn’t matter whats said. I have the choice between a guy who stutters. A condition that doesn’t affect intelligence or mental faculties in any way. Or I have the choice of a convicted felon who has clearly only cares about himself the the point of mental instability.
I’m voting for Biden. Not because he is the best person for the job but because the alternative is a complete fascist shit show with all of his ignorant bigoted sycophant regressives willing the destroy the country. Not to return it to what it was in the past. Instead they seek to create some fantasy dictatorship that never was.
Nobody came away from the debate concerned about his stutter. This is like someone on the right calling Trump “a guy who speaks his mind”. I’m voting Biden too, but do you honestly think that’s why many of us will be holding our noses while doing so?
I’m pretty bad at speaking off the cuff but by all measures, I’m fairly intelligent (went to a competitive school for undergrad and got good grades, etc.)
When they announced that they were adding ad breaks I decided it was something I didn’t need to watch live. Then I saw the highlights and decided there’s no reason to go back and rewatch it.
Yeah, it doesn’t matter, at least for me. One candidate is old while the other is a 34 times convicted felon. The latter has made it clear he intends to dismantle the democratic institutions of our country and turn it into another fascist regime. At this point the DNC could platform a watermelon in a wig and I’d still vote for them over the convicted felon.
True. My comment was addressing the perception of Biden as portrayed by the major media outlets (they rarely ever mention that Trump is nearly the same age), but I concede that my comment could have been clearer in that regard.
I know both candidates and their positions. Don’t particularly like either candidate. Really dislike one of them. And I haven’t seen anyone host an actual, honest to god political debate in my life, and no, the final season of West Wing doesn’t count.
All that being true, why the blazes would I have watched this one? My entire life, debates have only ever been excuses to put the candidates up on a stage see which one looks prettier, and shout sound bites into a microphone. That’s not a debate, that’s a campaign ad. And I’m tired of them.
I would really like our nation to get back to a point where I can feel comfortable voting for the candidate whose policies I actually think are the best instead of having to vote against the candidate that I think will actually destroy the country.
Obviously both candidates suck, but The questions the moderators ask, can just be ignored by the candidates. There hasn’t been a good moderator in years, if ever. No one insists that the questions be answered and they continually ignore them.
Hold the candidates’ feet to the fire. Don’t let them go off tangent. Slap them down and insist on an answer to the question. They don’t want to answer? Cut their mic and move to the other candidate who might actually answer it.
Too many times during the debate were questions like abortion and climate asked, they were just ignored.
One of Trump’s debates, Anderson Cooper kept grilling him on something he refused to answer about. At one point he declared that Trump is refusing to answer that question, explicitly. It was probably the best moderation I’ve ever seen.
Then in one of the primaries, one of the moderators called Pete Buttigieg a liar after he said their information was false and corrected them (he in fact was not lying). That was possibly the worst moderation I’ve ever seen.
At least in this one they would say “the question was…” when they didn’t actually answer.
The problem is that the Trump and Biden camps set the rules at this debate.
The moderators were not allowed to live fact check, nor could they cut the candidate’s mic during their allotted time.
This means that the responsibility of countering Trump’s lies fell completely on Biden. There are so many lies, it would be a difficult task for any person.
But Biden signed up for this, and he failed spectacularly. None of Trump’s bullshit was effectively countered.
the responsibility of countering Trump’s lies fell completely on Biden.
Hitchen’s razor should apply, but this wasn’t really a debate in the first place. Hell, neither of these geezers is prepared to properly debate and their prep teams are just tic tacs and ice cream.
A proper debate for Trump and Biden is like setting up a mixer for you and two exes that you despise. What are you going to learn that you don’t already know?
Apparently the only way the candidates will agree to do it is if the format is so stilted that there's no chance of anyone learning anything or seeing the candidates get challenged on anything. It's basically just a taking-in-turns version of a campaign commercial.
What, indeed, is the point. Like a lot of American politics, the whole "debate" survives as a pointless vestige of a thing (now long forgotten) that was useful and productive in its original form, but now is mutated to a useless and unrecognizable monstrosity, which you have to pretend is super serious and important if you want to be able to be on TV.
(But seriously, what a terrible television program, one old man spouting nonsense and the other looking confused and lost. There was absolutely zero reason for anyone to watch it.)