Obviously because he’s a weak candidate (and has been from the very beginning) in what might well be the highest stakes presidential race in US history.

The debate didn’t suddenly create some notion of his weakness as a candidate - long before the debate, his prospects were already shaky at best, and the Dem establishment had already had to resort to basically trying to guilt trip people into voting for him.

All the debate did as far as any of that goes is drive home the point that people have been trying to make from the beginning - that he is and always has been a weak and uninspiring candidate at best.

And I’d say that rather obviously, if anyone’s repeating the mistakes of 2016, it’s the Dem establishment.

And on a bit of a side note - in response to the author’s smugly self-congratulatory view that the voters are mindless automatoms who just blindly do as the media tells them, I would just like to offer up a hearty, “fuck you.”

I should also add that his ABC interview on Friday only intensified my concerns. To me, all it really communicated is that he actually IS so wrapped up in his own ego and hubris that he doesn’t actually get that this is an existential election, and that the consequences for failure are well and truly catastrophic. Like, there’s a good chance we won’t have functional democratic processes anymore if he looses. But he thinks that’s fine because “he will have given it his all”, ignoring the fact that “his all” is shuffling around, trying to compromise with fascists, and bringing a deck of cards to the gunfight that American politics have devolved into these days.

Really, it’s an evolution of the concerns I had in the 2020 elections, which have kind of proven out to be completely true: that despite some clear domestic policy successes, he’s more or less out of touch with the fact that he’s playing with an absurdly outdated rule book, and does not seem to understand that the rules have fundamentally changed. He doesn’t get that a lot of his old bipartisan negotiating tactics are straight up self-defeating these days.

I am genuinely and deeply worried at this point that his refusal to see past his own personal situation in all of this is going to lead to the conclusion of the American experiment in its current incarnation, and replace it with something far, far darker.