Some political debates have highlights. The first U.S. presidential debate this year had only lowlights. Joe Biden called President Donald Trump "a clown.” Trump said Biden wasn’t smart. Biden said Trump "has been a fool.” And on it went, in what must have been the nastiest presidential debate in U.S. history. The most common word in the transcript will be "[crosstalk].”
Whose attacks landed best? The Trump campaign’s central critiques of Biden are that he is old and out of it, that he has spent too much time in D.C., and that he is too weak to resist his party’s left wing. Biden had a couple of senior moments during the debate. He forgot some of the details of his health care plan: The new government insurance plan he wants to create would not be limited to Medicaid patients, as he said. He flip-flopped twice on the Green New Deal in the span of a few sentences. But there was no devastating, memorable moment of befuddlement. He also had some crisp answers, and even a few good lines. (On COVID-19: "It is what it is because you are who you are.”)
Biden also, for the most part, managed to avoid Trump’s traps, helped by how painfully obvious Trump was in setting them. The president said that Biden wouldn’t say "law and order,” so Biden said law, order and justice. Biden ducked the question of whether he supports packing the Supreme Court, on the ground that he doesn’t want the topic to dominate the campaign-which is an excuse that will always apply to inconvenient issues. Trump, and moderator Chris Wallace, let it slide.