We asked so little of Joe Biden: repartee, coherence of ideas and energy. Just a little energy. He did so badly that even the comments of his opponents, according to which he revealed himself to be “the decrepit candidate of yesterday”, no longer appear out of place.
Everything has been said about this debate: a disaster for the outgoing president. I rushed, as soon as the last words were spoken, onto the floor of the “spin room”, the space reserved by CNN for each camp to come and praise the merits of its candidate.
The Democrats took more than half an hour before speaking to journalists. The Republicans did not need to be asked. They quickly occupied the entire space, imposing a rave analysis of the former president’s performance.
“SO MUCH MORE SOPHISTICATED, SO MUCH BETTER”
Turning a blind eye to the string of baseless and false allegations, Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s very first campaign manager in 2016, reveled in seeing him “calm, measured and articulating a message precisely in complete, coherent sentences. The same cannot be said of Joe Biden.”
“The greatest political debate victory I’ve ever seen”: Chris LaCivita, the current co-manager of Donald Trump’s campaign, still ecstatic, was already demanding a second debate and “in fact, if he had the balls, Joe Biden would do a third.”
Vivek Ramaswamy, the former candidate for the Republican nomination, who has never shown any sympathy towards Joe Biden, however allowed himself to argue that “the president has members of his family who do not do not love him, because those close to him, attached to him, would not have put him through this hell.”
YES, BUT INSIDE THE BOX…
You had to see the Democrats when they finally found the courage to talk to us: on top of each other, it was like being in a western movie with the pioneers forming a “circle of wagons” to defend themselves from the Apaches and Cherokees.
“Trump didn’t answer a single question,” Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock tried to impose. Others hammered home abortion here, abortion there, with the conviction and cohesion that their candidate lacked throughout the evening.
Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, was kind enough to convince us that from his “humble point of view, it is not a question of style, but of results produced for the American people”. However, it did not manage to make us forget 90 minutes of painful viewing.
SOMEONE APPROVED ALL OF THIS
At the White House, from one crisis to another, as if to reassure us, President Biden’s team, led by his press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, reminds us that he spent thirty-six years at the Senate and eight for the vice presidency. That he saw others and knew how to surround himself with competent and loyal advisors; the Tom Donilon, Ron Klain, Anita Dunn.
It is astonishing to think that these people, these close friends, these advisers who know him so well, did not suspect that such a debacle was possible. That they did not see, like us who have been covering him for more than three and a half years as president, that he is slower than in 2020, that he often mumbles his speeches and that he no longer speaks without reading a note that was prepared for him.
If, following his poor performance in the debate, there is reason to be concerned about seeing Joe Biden seek to extend his stay in the White House, we must also seriously question the lucidity of his entourage who did not know how to discourage him from throwing himself into the lion’s den, who did not have the honesty to simply tell him: “It’s time, Joe, to go home.”
