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I only listened to the debate for about ten minutes while I was in the car, and that was well over an hour into the debate, so I can't comment on most of it. But from what I did hear, while Biden definitely lacked energy, the actual substance of his responses was much better than Trump's. Trump repeatedly ducked questions, while Biden actually answered them. Not that Biden's performance was that great, but if you were to go off of the transcripts only it seemed about even. Of course, when I got back in the car well after the debate ended and had to listen to the NPR rundown they were sticking a fork in Biden, mainly based on the same things everyone here is criticizing him for, and it reminded me why I hate debates. It's all spectacle. Even when speaking strictly on matters of substance, I want a president who can make reasoned decisions after consultation with experts, not someone who can come up with answers on the fly. Like, yeah, there is some of that in the presidency, but very little, and almost all of it involves foreign policy emergencies where he'll at least get to consult with his advisers. But even that doesn't matter, because the superficial aspects are all anyone seems to care about.
The thing is, I think people on the Motte are overall going to be more charitable to Biden than the average normie voter, even if we don’t like him. Because we have access to a much less tightly controlled info-space. We’ve probably all seen a bunch of compilations of his sentences turning into gibberish, or him talking about how he’s just met a world leader that’s been dead for twenty years, or having to be physically turned around at an event because he’s facing the wrong way. To us, his debate performance would seem about normal, better than average for him even. For most people it’s not like that. If you’re a not particularly plugged-in liberal, your only exposure to him is two State of the Union addresses that he was drilled on for months and read off a teleprompter, and carefully edited CNN clips of his best moments, where he seems quite bright and energetic. For those people, to see him in an unscripted environment and notice that he really does occasionally have trouble finishing his sentences, and sometimes loses his train of thought is very shocking and disturbing.
Do you really think people have higher exposure to positively-edited CNN clips, more so than negatively-edited TikTok clips? I don't think that's accurate at all. I think most people have seen more clips, and causal conversations with many conservatives not uncommonly turns up at least one reference to Biden losing it, in my personal experience, so I imagine that's similar for others in swing states.
Conservative voters are obviously more likely to have seen videos and discussion of Biden falling, freezing up, or talking incoherently (whether fairly edited or not). Liberal and swing voters, otoh, are much more likely to have only seen positive coverage, which is why they are currently freaking out about Biden’s performance.
I wonder how many of them are putting 2 and 2 together (ie the republicans said Biden was mentally unfit, the media told us they were lying, but Biden clearly is mentally unfit ergo the media was lying).
Sadly, I'm sure most will reach for a relief valve against cognitive dissonance; they'll claim it's a recent development. If anything, they might end up blaming conservatives because their unprincipled claims for years that Biden was unfit made them ignore his actual decline when it happened.
As someone who hasn’t been paying much attention, when did the mental decline happen then? Because Biden seems much more declined compared to 2020
Edit: this commenter suggests that it is in fact a relatively recent development https://www.themotte.org/post/1054/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/224758?context=8#context
Biden has been gaffe-prone his entire life. But I believe there's been an increasing chorus of voices talking about something adjacent to early stages of dementia starting around the beginning of this year. Sorry, no specific citations, just my general impression from listening to lots of news and pundits.
Whether Biden actually has dementia is an interesting question. I have known a number of elderly people through the entire dementia-related decline, in situations both very fast (like a year/18 months) and much slower, where the decline happened over more like a decade.
The way Biden speaks and acts during his muddled, confused phases like in the debate isn’t very similar to what I saw in those people. I know we have actual doctors here who probably have more experience with older patients with cognitive degeneration, but to my mind it doesn’t seem like dementia specifically. It almost seems like what happens when I’ve seen people on very powerful painkillers or downer drugs and they just kind of become incoherent. Dementia in the early stages often looks much more like very confident, almost angry restating of incorrect truths (“Stan is dead? Stop bullshitting me, I saw him yesterday for breakfast”), but not grammatically incorrect or mumbling or trailing off really, just memory loss.
Biden seems able to remember near-term facts to some degree, even if he sometimes muddles them up. But the sentence trailing and incoherency would typically come long after memory-related decline became MUCH more obvious and frequent than it currently is for Biden.
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