In his first debate with Jimmy Carter in 1976, President Jerry Ford mangled a pre-planned answer to a different question than the one Max Frankel of the New York Times actually asked him, and by the time good ol’ Jerry Ford was done, Poland was liberated from Soviet domination. (I tell the whole story in some detail in chapter 11 in my Age of Reagan, volume 1.) “Ford Lays an Egg,” was one headline about his gaffe.
I think something similar happened to President Biden last night, but because of his incoherence and general senility it was hard to notice clearly. Remember in 2016 when Hillary said most of Trump’s supporters belonged in “a basket of deplorables,” which contributed to Hillary’s loss? She made it obvious what liberal elites think of a large number of their fellow American citizens who don’t have ivy league educations and luxury opinions.
Biden had his own “deplorables” moment in the debate last night.
Biden’s blooper came during the exchange with Trump over abortion. (By the way, Trump was superb on this issue, and did a very effective job of portraying Democrats as the abortion extremists. I think I know who Trump has been listening to on this issue, and well done, pals! You know who you are out there.) Remember that polls show Biden’s greatest strength over Trump is abortion, while immigration is his weakest. So for some inexplicable reason, Biden decided in his reply on abortion to change the subject to . . . immigration! This was political malpractice of the highest order, and I can only imagine how many of Biden’s debate handlers were smacking their heads on the table when Biden did this.
Trump had brought up recent cases of illegal immigrants who murdered Americans. Pay close attention to how Biden tried to handle both immigration and abortion in this response (from the CNN transcript):
Look, there’s so many young women who have been – including a young woman who just was murdered and he – he went to the funeral. The idea that she was murdered by a – by –by an immigrant coming in, and they talk about that. But here’s the deal, there’s a lot of young women who are being raped by their – by their in-laws, by their – by their spouses, brothers and sisters, by – just – it’s just – it’s just ridiculous. And they can do nothing about it.
Just what the hell is Biden trying to say here? There’s an epidemic of rape by American citizens? (And I think we know just which kind of American citizens he has in mind here—hint: they live in Ohio, etc.) Americans are actually worse people than the illegal immigrants? And we need liberal abortion laws because of this rape epidemic among the working class? I’d love to know (maybe we will someday) just what his 16-person debate prep team thought they were preparing him to say.
[Hat tip to regular reader BZ for alerting me to look closer at this statement.]
P.S. If you want to know just how bad Biden was on this point, check out Jon Stewart’s post-debate treatment. To be sure, the entire 15-minute segment throws a lot of mud at Trump, but the first 8 minutes are about how bad Biden was, and they are golden:
