{UAH} THERE'S STILL TIME FOR DEMOCRATS TO CHOOSE SOMEONE TO FACE TRUMP -> National Post

Jamie Sarkonak: Joe Biden's long unblinking stare is fit for retirement

There is still time for Democrats to choose someone else to face Trump

Author of the article:

Jamie Sarkonak

Published Jun 28, 2024  •  Last updated 14 minutes ago  

 

U.S. President Joe Biden looks on as he participates in the first presidential debate of the 2024 elections with former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at CNN's studios in Atlanta, Georgia, on June 27, 2024. PHOTO BY ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP

In case you missed the American presidential debate on Thursday, here’s an analogy to help you understand how it went.

Picture yourself seated in a gaudy circus tent. The headline act is a Roman-style gladiator fight with a lion. An aged but straight-backed legionnaire saunters into the ring. Then, out comes the animal. You wince. It’s an old thing that needs to be tugged along by the chain of a beast master. His eyes are greyed over. His fur is patchy and his arthritic limp hints at why: he’s too stiff to groom himself properly. His bones stick out like those of your elderly cat’s did in the final years of its life.

There was a time when he could clear fiery hoops with ease, but it’s long passed. This circus “fight” is un dignifying to everyone involved, and the gladiator knows it. He mimes a lunge at the beast anyway, who doesn’t seem to see or hear. The show must go on. The beastmaster prods his charge to extract a confused, un-ferocious growl. This continues for an hour and a half. Ugh. The poor thing belongs in a sanctuary.

And that was the presidential debate.

From the first few minutes, it was clear that President Joe Biden wasn’t there. In what should have been the equivalent of an F1 race, he was struggling with a simple driver’s licence renewal. The policy talk hardly mattered — one candidate, former president Donald Trump, could string a sentence together; the other could not. Biden breathlessly recited internalized talking points that made varying levels of sense; Trump could speak full sentences, paragraphs even.

When he wasn’t speaking, Biden reverted to an empty stare, mouth agape and eyes unblinking. Other times, he looked down, or closed his eyes — it was hard to tell.

As far as substance goes, the topics were what you could expect: economy, abortion, environment, Ukraine/Israel … and immigration, which Trump tied many of his answers back to. It was a sensible choice. Biden is on the verge of offering some illegal immigrants citizenship while his administration has seen record-high border arrivals, and recent high-profile cases of migrant rape have triggered even more outrage. Many Americans have soured on immigration — so much so that they see it as the top problem facing the country, according to Gallup.

On the economy, Biden warned that Trump would cut social programs. Trump retorted that social supports are already being stretched thin due to migration. On abortion, Biden fretted that Trump would roll back rights. Trump responded that he’d keep the status quo set out by the courts — and flipped it back to migrant rape.

Biden eventually seemed to defend migration as a source of economic growth. “Seemed,” because fragments of his ideas often had to be pieced together by the viewer. They were strewn much further apart than in 2020, when the two men last faced off.

There is no dignity in taking on an opponent who doesn’t have all his faculties, and perhaps that’s why Trump didn’t go for the jugular. He left Biden’s most glaring shortfalls to speak for themselves (aside from stating at one point, quite fairly: “I really don’t know what he said … I don’t think he knows what he said either.”) There were no utterances of “Sleepy Joe” and “Crooked Joe,” and no mockeries of Biden’s motor challenges which are often made at rallies. The lack of an audience made the event less humorous, but maybe that’s for the best.

When it was over, only one candidate needed to be led off the stage by a handler.

A lot of systems, a lot of accountability checks, had to fail to put this man in charge of the United States’ nuclear codes. One wonders how his family could put a man before the country like this. As for the Democrats, they at least have time to make their situation less bad. The party convention is in August, and an emergency swap can still be made.

Will it be made? Possibly, but they’ve made this show go on for so long already. The ethical time to send this man into retirement was months ago.

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