Biden lacked oomph, but the transcript tells a different tale
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4745771-biden-lacked-oomph-but-the-transcript-tells-a-different-tale/
Biden lacked oomph, but the transcript tells a different tale
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4745771-biden-lacked-oomph-but-the-transcript-tells-a-different-tale/
38 comments
“Your impressions are wrong, the transcripts are right”
The problem with this is that the country isn’t made up of a bunch of intellectuals and deeply politically involved people. It’s made up of people who read the headlines, watch the big debates, and make a decision based on what they feel at the time.
The average American isn’t going to sit down and go through the transcripts after they watched it on TV. If your message is that your candidate actually did well, but people just have to read and dig deeper to see it, then you’re grasping for straws.
Maybe dems should stop trying to gaslight the American people and instead should focus on putting out a candidate that actually inspires confidence in their party. I’d hate to see Trump to win in November.
He lacked the ability to finish most sentences, but one’s he did finish had policy, and facts, and shot down the lie Trump said before that. (Which, if you were paying attention, Trumpy lied on every single question, dodging most)
The transcript is a goldmine of just how fucking stupid and a lair trump is
I wish we had the post-debate Biden instead of the version we got.
That said; I agreed with him when he said stuff.
Biden was absolutely appalling, anyone trying to spin it any other way is either totally deluded or a Trump troll.
It was a TV debate, swing voters who decide this election are not going to sit and read a transcript.
Biden failed at presenting as a legitimate presidential candidate. Against that orange shit stain, it should have been a walk in the park. Get Biden into retirement now or prepare for years in a fascist dictatorship.
What you saw with your own eyeballs was wrong actually, here’s the real version
Biden looking half-dead and senile on stage definitely hurt his chances of winning against trump.
We can’t try to downplay how badly he performed, and how it gave more credence to concerns from voters about his health, but we can’t panic either.
​
How Biden acts over the next week will determine how damaging this ends up being. If he spends the rest of the week campaigning with energy and vigour then his debate performance can be more easily chalked up to just him having a bad day.
There’s a reason debates aren’t done by letter
Trash article
No one is going to read the transcript. “Debates” are a show and you either perform or not.
The felony conviction count tells a very different story. The US media is such a joke that they’re trying to make it sound like trump is even a valid candidate rather than a convicted felon, a rapist, a fraud, a pedophile, and a genuine threat to national security who stole boxes and boxes of highly classified documents
Biden needs to step down.
Trump was just lying non stop.
Like I explained to someone earlier:
Energy- Trump gets an A, Biden gets an F
Message- Trump gets an F, Biden gets a B+
Truthfulness- Trump F-, Biden A+
The thing is, everyone looked at this with Energy being 50% of the grade. It’s a legitimate concern for the left looking at a candidate that puts doubt in their minds that he can make it through the next 4 years, let alone the next debate. We’re on the verge of a possible world war, and we need neither a man whom projects insanity and capitulation, nor one whom projects weakness and fragility. Biden is still the safer/saner bet, but how it will affect our reputation on geopolitical scale is yet to be seen.
You can put any headline you want on it, it doesn’t change the fact that the transcript is also utter garbage. Holy fuck, they’re literally counting on people seeing the headine and calling it good 😂
Incredible framing though, I’ll admit. Boiling down what happened to a lack of “oomph” is a strong play.
It doesn’t matter. The kind of people you need to convince aren’t going to read transcripts or look into fact checking. They will see a convincing liar and a confused old man and vote accordingly.
These headlines are sad asf
Let’s let Israel finish the job was enough proof Trump knows nothing, Yes Donald, let’s create even more terrorists your son in law friends Netanyahu loves.
No voters are going to read the transcripts. What Biden said and what he conveyed to the audience are two completely different things.
Biden lost the debate plan and simple. Clinton said it best when he said voters prefer strong and wrong to weak and right !!!
Here comes all of the apologist trying to convince us not to believe our own eyes and ears. For the love of God we need to defeat Trump and Biden cannot do it
Okay thats great and all if we relied solely on printed news but theres this thing called the internet which has caused everyone’s attention spans to decrease so that only optics matter now.
Will the average undecided voter read the transcript ?
He’s fucking 81 years old!!!! Should just go play bingo and chill. We need new blood
They’re working so hard to spin what we watched
Keep pulling those cope strings. Maybe it will help.
Here we go, gaslighting us.
Did anybody actually expect trump to stand there quietly while his mic was cut? I feel like that specific scenario is what Biden was prepared for, and when trump actually kept composure, their entire plan crumbled.
LOL what. In both the video and transcript biden’s statements are incoherent.
Nobody who was saw the debate is going to go read those transcripts and have their mind changed. Biden looked old and fragile
This is the denial stage. I thought we were past that
People aren’t fucking robots. They have eyes and ears.
This cope is reaching unprecedented levels.
As I’m reading thru the Comments, the thought of reactions/opinions from people in those ‘focus groups’ when those *same* transcripts (ANY Biden or trump speech, for that matter), is read back aloud by, oh say Siri or Alexa or even a real person.
Note, voice characterizations originated by [Mel Blanc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Blanc) are NOT ALLOWED. But [HAL ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy4EfdnMZ5g&ab_channel=Movieclips)reciting those speeches might be interesting.
Don’t listen to BS like this to make you feel better about Biden. 49 Million people watched live and saw Biden’s train wreck of a performance. He’s a good man, but it’s time for him to step aside. A late replacement will give the party energy and a chance at beating Trump.
Trump wins handily against Biden because there is no enthusiasm for Biden and turnout will be down. Trump’s voters will be there. Biden’s will stay home.
False or misleading Biden claims at CNN debate
– Only President in awhile who didn’t have “any troops dying anywhere in the world”
– $15 per shot cap on insulin in Medicare
– $200 cap on overall drug spending in Medicare
– border now has fewer crossings then when Trump was in office
-unemployment was at 15% when he took office
Trump wants to get rid of social security
– billionaires pay 8.2% in taxes
-Trump told Americans to inject bleach during Covid crisis
– border patrol endorsed him
– American has a thousand trillionaires
– he has the most support for veterans.
I feel like we keep getting gaslit about this, it’s such a bad look. Let’s just look at two of Biden answers.
In response to an easy question about abortion, where Trump lied so I credible obviously that he should have had plenty of points to make:
> The fact is that the vast majority of constitutional scholars supported Roe when it was decided, supported Roe. And I was – that’s – this idea that they were all against it is just ridiculous.
> And this is the guy who says the states should be able to have it. We’re in a state where in six weeks you don’t even know whether you’re pregnant or not, but you cannot see a doctor, have your – and have him decide on what your circumstances are, whether you need help.
> The idea that states are able to do this is a little like saying, we’re going to turn civil rights back to the states, let each state have a different rule.
> Look, there’s so many young women who have been – including a young woman who just was murdered and he went to the funeral. The idea that she was murdered by – by – by an immigrant coming in and (inaudible) talk about that.
> But here’s the deal, there’s a lot of young women who are being raped by their – by their in-laws, by their – by their spouses, brothers and sisters, by – just – it’s just – it’s just ridiculous. And they can do nothing about it. And they try to arrest them when they cross state lines.
Parts of this are fine, and parts of it are completely unintelligible. First, to me it says a lot that he didn’t even use the word abortion at all. Nor did he mention a woman’s right to choose, actually he kinda did the opposite. The first paragraph is refuting what Trump said about everybody wanting Roe overturned, and it’s the right thing to say. The second paragraph says this:
> And this is the guy who says the states should be able to have it. We’re in a state where in six weeks you don’t even know whether you’re pregnant or not, but you cannot see a doctor, have your – and have him decide on what your circumstances are, whether you need help.
Up until the last sentence this was going great. But I have a big issue with the last bit. The problem with banning abortion isn’t that doctors can’t decide what’s best for women, it’s that women can’t decide what’s best for themselves. At 6 weeks, women should have the right to terminate their pregnancy at will. Period. That has been the democrats line for DECADES, why did Biden not say that here?
And the third paragraph is completely unintelligible:
> Look, there’s so many young women who have been – including a young woman who just was murdered and he went to the funeral. The idea that she was murdered by – by – by an immigrant coming in and (inaudible) talk about that.
I can try to interpret it after the fact but the transcript doesn’t make this any better. It doesn’t even matter what his point was, this is so unintelligible as-is that it’s useless. It’s wasted time. I know people will show up to this comment and try to doctor this paragraph to make it look like it has a point but I don’t think you really can because it is completely garbled.
And the 4th paragraph is also a bit garbled, but at least it makes a point. Though even reading it and not listening to it it’s hard to tell if his point is that women who are raped can’t do anything about being raped (which is true, but not exactly relevant) or can’t do anything about their pregnancy if they get pregnant from rape (which is most likely what he meant, but he didn’t manage to complete the thought)
This should have been a incredibly easy question. “I believe women have the right to choose when to have a abortion up to the third trimester, at which point a doctor needs to be involved in the decision. Many women become pregnant because of rape, and those women should not be forced to carry their rapists babies. Laws like those here in Georgia prevent those women from doing so, because they may not even know they are pregnant before the deadline has passed.” Like, that’s been the party line for decades. Biden absolutely knows how to say that, so why didn’t he? I know people are going to say” well it’s *obvious* what he *meant* when you see it written down” but that doesn’t matter, this is a live debate not an essay contest. In the actual performance it looked like he was an old man who got completely lost on this topic, a topic that should be astounding ly easy for him. You can go back and try to pick the good parts out all you want, but it doesn’t change the impression that everyone watching it live got.
But honestly I think the worst answer he gave was this:
> There was no inflation when I became president. You know why? The economy was flat on its back. 15 percent unemployment, he decimated the economy, absolutely decimated the economy. That’s why there was no inflation at the time.
He just straight up admitted he is the cause of inflation. There is no other way to interpret this, he (wrongly) said there was no inflation when he became president. The rest of what he says is trying to justify why inflation is so bad now. This is one of the biggest issues for Americans right now. For the last 4 years the democrats have been saying this isn’t their fault, that Trump caused this inflation and that they’re working to bring it down.
Look, we can keep posting cope articles about how actually the transcripts make it better and don’t believe what you actually watched Thursday, and keep down voting people who point out ah, it actually was as bad as it was and maybe the democrats need to face that and deal with it, but that won’t change the facts here. The fact is that most Americans are not on reddit. They don’t care what r/politics is saying. They watched the debate, and saw Trump being his normal, bloviating self, and they saw Biden looking half dead, and they’re going to get 4 months more of seeing clips from that debate that make Biden out to be a senile old man, and they’re going to simply jot vote, or vote third party. Biden cannot rely on the popular vote to win. He has to win in very specific states, which he only just scraped by in in 2020. He will not win Georgia with this debate performance. He won’t win Arizona.
The democrats need to recognize the very real danger they are in. There are down ballot races that are critical for them to win that completely fall apart for them if people aren’t showing up to vote. They cannot afford low turnout in this election, but that’s exactly what they’re going to get with Biden.
Yeah, everyone knows Biden knows what he’s talking about and Trump is perpetually divorced from reality like it’s another past wife. That’s exactly why Republicans hate Biden and love Trump.
Unfortunately, televised debates are all about the superficial flash. At the same time, they probably don’t actually matter. Articulate Trump is still saying crazy bullshit and will still appeal to the party of crazy bullshit. Disastrous Biden is still better than Trump, and people who plan to vote for the best of the candidates we have will vote for him.
And CNN will continue to be insufferable.
Dude I watched it live, this was more than a stutter. You see that coming back from a family dinner and you have to explain to kids that grandpa’s mind is starting to go and to value all the time you have with them. I think literally anyone else that takes his place will when by a large majority just because people want to see someone different than the two geriatrics we have now.