Will One Bad Debate Night Mean One Bad Election Day?

Bret Stephens: Gail, in our last conversation I asked you whether you would join me in calling for Democrats to find a new nominee if Joe Biden had a disastrous debate performance. You replied that it would have to be “super disastrous.”

Did the president’s performance on Thursday night meet your definition of “super”?

Gail Collins: Bret, I was thinking about you all through the debate. You were worried Biden would “lose it with some obvious memory lapse, slurred sentence or troubling blank stare.”

I pretty much dismissed your concerns, and I was, um, sorta wrong. But I did say I’d join you “if the president suddenly goes blank and stares at the screen in silence or forgets where he’s speaking …”

But hey, it wasn’t that bad. Quite.

Bret: It wasn’t?

Gail: OK, I’m coming around to your way of thinking. Biden shouldn’t be the nominee. Even if he makes a comeback from the he’s-way-too-old moments of the debate, we’ve got months before the election. And years before he’d be stepping down for good if he wins.

Bret: Which, I am 99 percent convinced, he can’t.

What America saw last week wasn’t a guy having a bad debate night. It’s the man Robert Hur, the special counsel in the Biden documents case, described earlier this year as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur is owed a public apology from every pompous pundit who dumped all over him for telling the truth. And Americans are owed better from the Democratic Party than a president tipping into senescence while his dishonest aides pretend that everything about the president’s health is hunky-dory.

So will it, or should it, be Kamala Harris, as our colleague Lydia Polgreen argued last week?

Gail: She certainly deserves a shot — Harris has done a good job as veep and she’s overcome a lot of the political defects people found in her earlier. Possibly because she’s young enough to engineer a turnaround. Sigh.