By Rich Lowry
Saturday, July 06, 2024
Biden may have helped himself last night with his sheer
adamance that he’s not getting out since he’s basically in a game of chicken
with his own party — the less likely it seems that he’s going to go, the harder
it makes it on everyone to publicly call on him to go. But it wasn’t, as Phil and Mark note below, a reassuring performance.
If we just take his debate explanations alone, these are
things we never hear from a sitting president. The idea that he was too tired
and too rattled to turn in a coherent performance is, in itself, a damning
concession. The word “exhausted” came up several times. It was easier to miss
this in response to Stephanopoulos asking when he realized he was having a bad
night:
Well, it came to me I was havin’ a
bad night when I realized that even when I was answering a question, even
though they turned his mic off, he was still shouting. And I — I let it
distract me. I — I’m not blaming it on that, but I realized that I just wasn’t
in control.
A president of the United States should be able to handle
someone yapping at him off mic. Regardless, Biden’s most notorious line of the
night, the “beat Medicare” riff, came early on before the attempted cross-talk
got heavier in the middle of the debate.
At the end of the day, there’s no benign explanation for
Biden’s performance. Either he’s too fragile (too tired, too easily distracted)
to perform at a high level, or too addled. The latter is worse, but neither is
good.
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