The debate tonight. Will it be watched?

The audience for political debates have been decreasing and never before have we had a June debate?

Of course there is lots of buzz over the "big debate" tonight between a pair of dudes who are 159 years old between the two of them. I suspect that many will wonder if they can both stay awake for the whole debate.

To be honest, the age issue is not the same here for the two candidates. Biden has problems getting from here to there without falling down, while the Donald won a club gold championship just a couple of months back. Biden has problems putting two sentences back to back, while Trump still has that ability to go on long tirades, even while possibly flubbing a fact or two. Much of the same media who spend weeks talking about how Donald Trump held a handrail while he was President (meaning his physical abilities were all but drained) while simultaneously telling us that watching Biden fall down, wander off, or spurt incoherent streams of words together is part of a "big fake" plan (possibly engineered by Russia) to make Biden look bad.

My prediction is simple. Joe Biden will be hyped up much like he was during the State of the Union. He will appear energetic, and will probably have his pat answers down for much of the questions. After all they have been doing nothing but debate prep for the past week or more. If you do not believe that the Biden team has every single question that CNN will ask him up front, then you don't understand how these media driven debates work. With no audience, mics turned off between questions, and little interaction, there will be no need for ad-lib or anything that would require him to think on his feet. It will be a case of whether or not Biden can simply remember what he has been told to say. If he does that to any sort of degree, then he will be declared the winner.

The downside for Biden is that there seems to be only two versions anymore. The dazed and confused Joe Biden being led around by the hand, and the hyped up angry Biden who yells everything and likes to tell stories that are not true. The Biden team is hoping for the latter as the lesser of two evils, but not sure how well angry storytelling will play to the audience. People want to know whether Joe is up to the job, but there may not be much difference between senile old man and angry get off my lawn old man. Biden won the election in 2020 on the idea that he was the down to earth stable man who could reassure Americans. Not sure that version ever existed in real life, but it is what people voted for.