Paolo Kernahan
'OK, BIDEN was terrible in the debate. But focus, people! We must get behind Biden, otherwise we're finished as a country!'
As an unprecedented natural disaster was churning its way through the Caribbean, Americans were assessing the aftermath of a stomach-churning man-made disaster.
The debate between a visibly frail and intermittently vacant US president and the morally bankrupt and abhorrent challenger Donald Trump was striking.
For his part, Trump sauntered into the debate with nothing to prove or lose. Unfettered by the weight of expectations, the embattled but unbothered former president was free to be his evasive, toxic self. Biden, throughout the debate, couldn't sustain enough lucidity to manage a decent rebuttal against Trump's vomitus of fiction, race-baiting and political base-baiting with all the old conjured hurts and hatreds.
A surge of panic swept through the Democratic camp, with many senior politicos calling for Biden to step aside - a call echoed by the most influential, left-leaning publications in the US. This crescendo of judgement coming from "inside the house" is like a son being turned over to the police by his own mother.
For the Republican cabal and Trump's most rabid flock, the night couldn't have gone any better. Their man didn't have to "win." Indeed, the former president was his own version of incoherent, albeit more energetically so. All that was needed was for Biden to glitch enough to turn a failing grade into a pass. Trump at the podium was the lord of odium, yet his animus burned brightly enough to illuminate Biden's apparent neural decay.
In fevered defence of their nominee, Democrats volunteered that while the president is indeed of advanced years and has slowed "somewhat," he has a phalanx of competent advisers. This response, meant as a palliative for skittish Democratic voters, seems to obviate the need for the office of president - the nation can simply be run by committees; special interest groups, even.
Americans only recently had a reminder of what that looks like under Trump. At least ten of his former associates and trusted political advisers are, like himself, convicted felons with many of them sentenced to prison terms.
The left is hoping the existential threat of a second term under a man to whom the rule of law doesn't apply (as upheld by the Supreme Court) will be impetus enough for voters to get behind Biden. This is notwithstanding glaring evidence of precipitous cognitive decline. Such faith may be misguided. Biden's support among black voters remains brittle.
Worse still, he is polling poorly with the youth demographic. There's strident contempt for his presidency among them, owed in no small measure to the administration's complicity in Israel's disproportionate violence against the Palestinian people.
To be fair, the youth set are no more enamoured of Trump, whom they dismiss as corrupt and a fool.
For those who think of young American voters as feckless and ageist, Bernie Sanders, who is older than Bide
