The very first note relayed by CNN's anchor after the speech reflected the dementia concerns - relief that Biden had only one "senior moment". Viewers were then instructed that this is what constitutes success for a presidential candidate.
The worries over cognitive decline explain why people are not expecting Biden to win the debates, per recent polls. Many expect Trump to run over him. "Victory" for Biden will thus be the same as his convention speech - avoid "senior moments" which would undeniably disqualify him.
One cannot understate how this very uninspirational candidate is contributing to the incredible, deadly, ever-more shocking malaise in the US this year. Biden has been unsuccessfully running for the presidency since 1988 - why would Americans look forward to the next four years with the long-unwanted and now possibly senile Biden?
What also cannot be understated is how appalling it is that the leading US presidential candidate has been so very absent from the public eye, and for so very long, and despite so many legitimate questions about possible dementia. Sequestering Biden is a dangerous game, and not only because isolation has had such a negative effect on countless seniors during this pandemic: Should Biden get elected and we see his senility increase, how can Americans not react with more political alienation and apathy towards a chattering class which would have to be found guilty of covering for Biden?
The debates are going to have such a record impact because it's the only chance Americans will have to answer urgent and well-founded questions about a "Hiden' Biden" who has not been intellectually tested in months.
But how can it be that in the so-called "leader of the free world" voters only get to see their future leader three times?
Americans are essentially being told that they should accept the private decision of the political elite which surrounds Biden that he is indeed intellectually capable of being president - this is not "direct democracy" but "indirect democracy", and a most curious one. "Indirect democracy with American characteristics" not only isn't exportable, it's not even a model Americans themselves want.
Pity the poor American: they have fair questions about their leading presidential candidate, but his privileges are so extraordinary that he doesn't have to deign to respond. Europeans can sympathise, as there is a clear parallel here with the refusal to heed their repeated rejections of right-wing austerity imposed by Brussels.
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