Joe Biden won on points last night. Barely. And he will probably win on points on November 3. It remains to be seen whether that is sufficient.
“Biden did not do a face plant,” said political analyst Charlie Cook. “That is all he needed to do.”
Really? That is a pretty low bar. Biden’s several missed chances to blow away Trump on his serial whoppers are a reminder of why this race is closer than it ought to be.
Sheer decency versus coarse narcissism and incompetence wins. But it ought to win bigger.
Watching Trump last night, one is reminded of his sly, feral power. Lies and all, he came across as a forceful brute.
Sylvia Plath’s bitterly ironic poem about her father included these lines:
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
There is surely some horrible truth to that, though it obviously doesn’t apply to every woman. But more than half of white women voted for Donald Trump in 2016, over Hillary Clinton no less. And there are scads of alienated men who are attracted to the brute in Trump.
Is Joe Biden’s mild decency enough to counter that? We’ll soon find out.
The last line of Plath’s famous poem is “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”
Perhaps that’s how a healthy majority now feels about Donald Trump, after four years of brutishness.
On the other hand, Sylvia Plath, damaged by her tragic suffering, killed herself. Let’s hope American democracy, gravely damaged, decides to live.
