1:19
Finally got round to watching the Biden debate on the YouTubes. Palin stuck to talking points or strung catch-phrase words together in various semblances of sentences. Biden was exactly the kind of dull administrator you want actually a heartbeat away from a difficult job but, more importantly, he seems to actually think before he talks. Often for a more subtle pivot onto message, but also to actually think. Which is why he has so many gaffes, because you do tend to slip up when you think in public. But it’s something a politician should do. The one moment that actually did get me was when he choked up about losing his child.
Political children are often used as military props, but when Biden was first elected for Senate his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident. He didn’t know if his sons (in the car) would make it. I’m friends with some kids and it’s amazing how awning and impossible that fear of them getting hurt is. It’s like a dark cavern you can’t even look into. So the man’s been hurt, and he raised his sons on his own for five years, commuting back from Washington on the train. I guess he could play that off in the debate, but I don’t think he was. About 1:19, he was responding to the idea that as a man he couldn’t identify with concern for ones children. He mentioned that he knows what it’s like, and what it’s like to not know if a kid is going to make it, and he choked.
Not like it helped him rhetorically, he choked in the awkward sense that you can’t talk anymore and you get that feeling behind your eyes. And he didn’t dwell on it, he visibly tried to overcome it like a cough and get going. And in that moment you can empathize, cause it’s shit scary losing a child, and god damn that would hurt for the rest of your life.
And then Palin pivots to her ‘Maverick’ talking point and you’re like, fuck, was she even listening.