New York Times columnist Frank Bruni weighed in on the second Democrat debate on Wednesday in Detroit saying he expected “so much more” from former vice president and presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Such is his disappointment, Bruni is now “fretting” none of the more than 20 Democrats who want to remove Donald Trump from the White House will be able to succeed.
But despite the column’s headline — “Debate Disappointment: I Wanted So Much More From Joe Biden: I find myself fretting that none of these Democrats can beat Donald Trump” — Bruni begins his analysis by listing the “new” Kamalas that emerged to overshadow the California lawmaker and presidential hopeful.
Cory Booker is a new “Kamala” for taking on Biden’s criminal justice record.
“There are people right now in prison for life for drug offenses because you stood up and used that ‘tough on crime’ phony rhetoric that got a lot of people elected but destroyed communities like mine,” the New Jersey lawmaker said in reference to the city of Newark.
Kristen Gillibrand is also a new Kamala, according to Bruni, for slamming Biden about previous comments he has made about women working outside the home.
“But then Bill de Blasio was the new Kamala and Julián Castro was the new Kamala and even Kamala was the new Kamala, all of them determined to throw Biden off his stride and accelerate their own march forward in the process,” Bruni wrote.
And even if Biden was “better prepared” for this second round of debates, he didn’t do as well as Bruni had hoped:
And yet Biden hardly put the doubts about his sturdiness and stamina to rest. I so hoped and I so want to say otherwise, because I believe him to be a decent man, because he’s talking more sense than many of his starry-eyed adversaries, because it may well be that among the voters who will decide this election in the places where President Trump plans to fight hardest, Biden is a better — or at least safer — bet than any of the other candidates getting more than 2 percent in national polls right now.
But there’s that way in which he trails off at the end of a sentence or an argument, all the little hiccups en route, the messy seams connecting one thought to the next, the demeanor that falls into a maddening gray area between engaged and fully animated. If Booker and de Blasio traffic in too many exclamation points, Biden traffics in too many ellipses.
Bruni wrote his heart did a “little jig” and died “a little death” during Biden’s botched closing statement.
And, Bruni wrote, even if Biden was the main target of his rival candidates and he did well given the attacks it may not be good enough to win the debate or the presidency. And that may be the case for all of the other Democrat candidates.
Bruni concluded:
I kept looking for an assurance that he couldn’t deliver, listening for a lyricism that he couldn’t manage, praying for a sign that after two miserably failed presidential candidacies, the third time would be the charm for Biden and our amulet against Trump. I didn’t get that guarantee from him, but then I didn’t get it from anyone else, including the 10 candidates who debated the night before.
ABC News and Univision will host the next Democrat debate set for September 12 and possibly September 13, depending on which candidates qualify. The debates will be held at Texas Southen University in Houston.
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