I agree, it’s not like she can cross-examine Trump in a debate. She can say her piece during her allotted time (hopefully uninterrupted depending on the format), and Trump can ignore all of it, make up whatever he wants, and speak just as much as her, without any requirement to respond to anything she says.

So while her skills are certainly relevant, I don’t think the debate is necessarily the situation where I would say it’s her specialty. (Doesn’t mean she won’t do great, and I hope she does, but debating with Trump is definitely a “wrestling with a pig” kind of situation most of the time.)

I dunno, I remember that days before the debate, there was an article that was talk about how the republicans were painting themselves into a corner with all of their Biden has Dementia rhetoric because they were setting the bar so low that if “Biden finished the debate with a pulse, he would have won by their metrics”. It’s probably the old case of double talk, really. Biden was simultaneously both a roided out giga brain secret Stalin and a feeble confused old man prepared to die at literally any second.

True, but until then, the Biden campaign had done a pretty decent job of keeping a lid on his condition. The debate made it impossible to hide any longer. They just had to YOLO him out there and pray it wouldn’t be a fucking disaster.

Any other press conference that day would have likely had the same response.

He’s done a decent number press conferences before and since that debate and has seemed perfectly capable during all of them, but the big difference is the debate is a 90 minute event in the evening when Sundowners hits hard, and most if not all of those press conferences have been around mid-day when he’s reportedly most lucid. Anyone who’s cared for or been around aging individuals with dementia can tell from the debate that he has dementia and its progressed pretty far

They do matter because a debate can show a lot more than just answers. For example, I think for a lot of folks, the lowest point was when they started arguing about fucking golf. It showed pretty much everyone that these guys are both just utterly divorced from the real problems facing Americans. Most everyone I know IRL was just disgusted with both candidates by that moment. That nobody cared Trump lied isn’t a surprise. It’d be like being surprised that the sun rose in the east. It’s what Trump does, he’s a bullshit artist and everyone knows it, even the people who vote for him. That debate didn’t really change anyone’s evaluation of Trump. What was a surprise was Joe coming on the stage and just being an unintelligible mess. He did kind of get it together in the back half, but by then, the damage was done. That debate did change plenty of people’s evaluation of Biden, myself included.

I don’t lol.

I do read lemmy some now though, and a ton of sources for stuff are (unfortunately) on X