What, me worry?

Re the Presidential debate that has sparked a wave of panic or back slapping, depending on the side of the political fence you are on:

*  If you watch from the start, it is clear that Biden had a frog in his throat from the very beginning, and was rushing his answers.  It did sound plausible to me that he had a cold.   If he didn't, his voice still sounded affected by something.  Perhaps an ice cream before walking on stage? 😀 

* Yes, he sometimes became flustered and lost his train of thought when trying to respond to the cavalcade of lies and boasting that this format let go unchallenged by moderators.  But it is not as if where he was trying to go in his answers was not clear, in (I think) all cases.

*  He was completely unprepared for a camera concentrating on his facial expressions while listening to Trump.  I would be very surprised if that is a problem not fixed by the next debate.

* All of that said,  it remains as ludicrous as ever for anyone to claim he is suffering from dementia.   It is a delusion derived from selective editting and a barrage of propaganda.  Yes, he looks old.  He clearly understands complicated issues and remembers stuff.

* Of course it was not as energetic a performance as a younger person may give.  But the contrast of a sincere man doing his best in contrast to a narcissistic idiot who is trying to ride back in on immigration scaremongering (it was continually brought up by Trump) was clear.

* My theory that Biden looked far better if you didn't rely on a gaffe highlight reel is backed up by some of the immediate polling which indicated people agreed Biden had a bad debate, but it's not changing voting intention much:

Of course, turning in the best performance in a debate only matters if it translates into votes — so we also asked poll respondents (both those who watched the debate and those who didn’t) which candidates they were considering voting for after the debate. And if there was any silver lining from the debate for Biden, this was it: The face-off doesn’t seem to have caused many people to reconsider their vote. That said, Biden did lose a small share of potential voters: Post-debate, 46.7 percent of likely voters said they were considering voting for him, which was 1.6 percentage points lower than before the debate. (Note that this was not a straight horse-race poll; respondents could say they were considering voting for multiple candidates.)

So nope, I'm still not thinking Trump will win.  

A final point: I usually think Chaz on Planet America is too much into shallow horse racing style analysis.  But last night John Barron was insanely negative about how dire the debate had been for Biden and Chaz was trying to pull him back.   I don't doubt Biden will see worse polling as a result, but if he has a better performance in future, I am not convinced it is irrecoverable.