An excellent article. — Molly
The Intercept
In previous debates, Joe Biden, 76, came out of the gate relatively strong and lucid, not devolving into the kind of gibberish that makes for viral supercuts until the second or third hour of the debate. The vice president took a shortcut in the Democratic Party’s October debate on Tuesday night, skipping his typical strong first hour and heading straight for the looping, elliptical discursions his campaign has become known for. He punctuated it with perhaps the most patronizing barb the Democratic debates have seen this cycle.
It was Biden’s first debate that he didn’t come into as the front-runner, having been eclipsed in the polls by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and the first question, a softball on impeachment, came to her. He stumbled through his response on impeachment, then was pressed on his son Hunter Biden’s role on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company while Biden, as vice president, was leading Ukraine policy. It was a question that had no good answer — “On Sunday,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper said, “you announced that if you’re president, no one in your family or associated with you will be involved in any foreign businesses. My question is, if it’s not OK for a president’s family to be involved in foreign businesses, why was it OK for your son when you were vice president?” — and Biden didn’t give one.
After assuring viewers that, “Look, my son did nothing wrong,” he eventually veered into the first president’s famous farewell address on avoiding foreign entanglements but got entangled himself: “On the — look, the fact that George Washington worried on the first time he spoke after being elected president that what we had to worry about is foreign interference in our elections, it was the greatest threat to America.”
Biden’s most aggressive moment in the debate was his most cringeworthy. After he claimed that he was the only person on the stage who’d gotten big things done, Warren noted that she had ushered in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the first regulatory agency built in a generation, and did so over the fierce objections of Wall Street. Biden responded by claiming loudly that he had gone to the Senate and secured votes for it. That claim is dubious at best; Biden had no public presence in the debate over the CFPB and people involved with the fight over it say he did little to nothing behind the scenes either.
In shouting and pointing at Warren and attempting to take credit for her signature achievement, he finished with a verbal pat-on-the-head: “You did a hell of a job at your job,” he told her.
Biden's sunsetting incoherence was made all the more apparent by the contrast with the surprisingly robust return of Sen. Bernie Sanders, 78, making his first public appearance since his heart attack in Las Vegas two weeks ago. Sanders was looser and livelier than in previous debates, perhaps buoyed by expected endorsements from Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib; he has said that he feels stronger and healthier with two stents having cleared an artery blockage, and it certainly appeared that way on stage.
Biden, by contrast, was relatively absent from all the high-profile exchanges of the night: on the initial Medicare for All question, on the wealth tax, on assault weapons buybacks. On Syria, Biden called Trump’s withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria “the most shameful thing any president has done in modern history in terms of foreign policy,” but the word salad returned as he confused Afghanistan with Iraq — the disastrous invasion of which Biden himself supported.
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