KEPW News predicted teleprompter ban in 1st debate could affect Biden

Commentary immediately before and immediately after the presidential debate.

Richard Self (KEPW Newsday): It’s ‘Debate Day.’ I don’t know what to expect. CNN’s been asking over and over again, ‘Which Donald Trump will we get?’ He’s practiced for every manifestation of Donald Trump that there is. He gets the docile Donald Trump, and Donald Trump follows his advisors and is docile and just sticks to the debate. Biden’s ready for that. He comes off like, you know, Grumpy Trumpy, then Biden’s ready for that one.

[00:00:38] I think there’s no teleprompters, there’s no audience, so Trump can’t feed off of idiots. So that’s going to be interesting to me because they’re not going to be able to read what they’re saying, it’s got to be off the cuff. And Biden has his own issues with that, but Trump really has issues with that, so I don’t know, we’ll get a battery, a boat, and a shark story.

[00:01:04] One of these two people are going to win regardless of what anybody thinks or whether they’re going to opt out of voting or they’re going to vote for a different candidate. Unfortunately, these are the two candidates, and one of these two are going to win.

[00:01:21] And this is what’s going to happen, this is our system, like it or lump it, it’s been around for 250 years. I don’t think it’s supposed to be like this, I don’t know that the Founding Fathers thought that this would be this bad and this horrible, but, you know, it’s all about money and politics.

[00:01:38] All of this is now driven by money, and this is where there’s a problem. You can’t run for office unless you’ve got a war chest, and you have to either get donors to provide that, or you already have it, so most people who run are already wealthy in the first place.

[00:01:59] I don’t think the founding fathers wanted it that way at all. I think they wanted everybody to have the opportunity to serve as lawmakers.

[00:02:08] So, this, all this money and all of this, I recall not too long ago an interview that was done by 60 Minutes, there’s this secret money train that runs all the way through all the legislature, and you do the right things, you vote the right way, you cater to your lobbyists and all of this, and you will be on the money train.

[00:02:34] And with Trump, it was much more prominent. The money train was much more obvious. It was part of the whole thing, if Trump got mad at you, then you were off the money train. And if you were in his good graces, you made money. And that’s one reason people, that you wonder why good people are all of a sudden, like, ‘Oh, I like Trump now.’

[00:02:56] And you know, Obama walked in almost at the last minute and upset the whole apple cart and it was supposed to be Hillary’s show and Obama walked in and—But it’s along the same lines. It’s whoever will sell the party better, that’s who’s going to be the candidate, who will sell the party better. How many people, whose face on Facebook will appeal to you most? Will it be Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton? Who will get your little money?

[00:03:28] And that’s part of the money train. But Trump just made it so obvious, the money train, and it’s still obvious around him.

[00:03:36] And that’s another thing besides Project 2025, if you opt out, you don’t vote, or you vote for somebody besides these two characters, which, not the best scenario at all, it’s going to be between these two guys, that’s the reality. And I’ll just have to deal with it and deal with it that way. Because I don’t want a dictator. And that’s the difference. If we get Project 2025 in. It’s going to be the people that opted out that voted for somebody else that thought that they were going to show the system and the system will show them, especially if we get Trump in office.

[00:04:15] If you look in the right places, Democrats are firing up their voters and one of the biggest messages that they’re getting out is: If you don’t vote, and you don’t vote for the right person and you play all these games, I’m going to vote for somebody else or I’m not just going to opt out, not vote, then you’ll never be able to vote again. Because he’ll never leave office. He won’t, he won’t leave unless he’s assassinated.

[00:04:40] John Q: And after the debate:

[00:04:42] Richard Self: That was not a winning performance by Biden at all. He looked like he kept falling asleep. I would have rushed him some coffee during the commercial breaks. I would have just, like, ‘Chug this, chug this!’ I don’t get that at all.

And if I was Biden, I would have come out and said, ‘You know, look, I’ve done hours of debate prep and I am not well. My voice is hoarse. So please forgive me.’ And then I would have went on with my debate. But he didn’t say anything. So everybody looked at him.

[00:05:19] When Nixon debated JFK way back when in the first televised debate, Kennedy had no idea of really what he was going to say. Nixon was full of just valuable government information. I mean, Nixon knew everything about how things work and JFK was like, ‘I’m not really versed in all of this, I don’t know what I’m going to say, but I’ll just wing it.’

[00:05:47] And then all of a sudden, Nixon started sweating like a pig. And, next thing you know, JFK is coming off calm, cool, and collected in his responses. And yeah, he won the debate there.

[00:06:03] I don’t see one comedy news show, I don’t see how Colbert or Jon Stewart or anybody can ignore this falling asleep during Trump’s answers while Trump is speaking, Biden is like snoring away.

[00:06:19] That’s not a good look at all. Just from optics, that’s just not the look you want for your candidate. And then, like I say, he looks like he’s asleep and all of a sudden he looks like he’s waking up again, and, oh God, he looks like a corpse. He’s just not good. Then he’s stumbling. Even he got his two minutes to finish all this and he was like still stumbling.

[00:06:47] Yeah, this is not cool at all. And what happened to Dark Brandon?

[00:06:53] Yeah, ‘Dems are concerned about Biden’s performance tonight’ is the headline on CNN. There it is. And, absolutely, I would be concerned about all of this. I mean, geez, all that debate prep, I would have taken a couple of days off and relaxed. It looks like there was too much debate prep.

[00:07:16] I like how he told Trump he whines too much at the end. That was pretty good. But he wasn’t Dark Brandon. He wasn’t there. He was not there. And that’s just now the Dems are saying we have a problem after Biden’s performance tonight, they said, CNN, we have a problem. Well, yeah, if your guy is looking like he’s waking up all the time and half asleep—Biden didn’t look okay tonight. That was bad.

[00:07:49] And like I said, I’ve come on to Newsday before and had my scratchy voice, and I’ve apologized right in the beginning: ‘I’ve got a scratchy voice today. Pardon me. Let’s do Newsday. Sorry about that. But, you know, here I go.’

[00:08:07] And there was nothing there. He should have said, ‘I’ve got a cold,’ or ‘Pollen is getting to me,’ or whatever was, ‘Too much debate prep,’ I would have said that in the beginning right away, I’m a little hoarse because I did too much debate prep, or whatever it is, but he didn’t say that.

[00:08:27] And that would have excused a lot, now we have to guess and there’s going to be a statement from the White House in the next couple of days that Biden was having a cold and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that’s not going to, have the people that just watch this are going to see that and he’s still going to look like Nixon.

[00:08:49] Anytime that Trump was speaking, he had his head down and he looked like he was sleeping. That’s just terrible. That’s not a good look for the President of the United States. And then he would look up like he just got woke up from a nap. And oh, he was moving like a corpse today.

[00:09:10] Yeah, I would say that they have, Houston, we have a problem. This is not good. And yeah, the MAGAbillies are going to jump all over this and have a field day with it. And there’s nothing you can say in retort.

[00:09:27] I can try, but there’s nothing I can say. ‘ Biden is still strong.’ I don’t know about that. When they said to him, ‘You are 86 years old (at the end of your next term),’ he looked every bit of it. Every bit of 86 years old. You look like 91 tonight.

[00:09:45] That was not a good performance. (First Lady Dr.) Jill (Biden) should have said something. Somebody should have got him some coffee. I’d have got him a shot in the arm. I mean, this is really disappointing. I was waiting for Dark Brandon to come out and Biden doesn’t even have a voice to do it with.

[00:10:04] Well, now you’re Biden, you’re going to have to spend some money on some ads and put everything you got into some ads until September and come back for a rematch where you’re much more vocal, you’re much more, I mean, everybody, all kinds of different places on Facebook, and they were all like, ‘Fight, Joe, come on, what the—what are you doing? Come on, where’s Dark Brandon? Come on.’

[00:10:33] Everybody was trying to root for him and except for a couple of quips at the end and in between he had…nothing. He didn’t get his point across. Even when he had a point, he didn’t have the wherewithal to get it across and he kept stumbling.

[00:10:50] So, you know, I think there’s debate prep and then there’s like total debate prep where it exhausts you. That was stupid. That was just absolutely stupid on Biden’s part. Wow. What a horrible performance. So: ‘Aggressive panic now is the word among Democrats’ on CNN. Aggressive panic.

[00:11:17] I mean, that’s bad. A complete 180 from the State of the Union address. It gives credence to Trump saying that Biden was jacked up for the State of the Union address. And I don’t understand why they put him out there.

[00:11:37] I’m a sports fan. That’s like putting out your best athlete when he’s just dead tired. He’s not had any rest in 48 hours or 72 and he’s up to bat or he’s out to throw the ball, it’s not going to look good. It’s just not going to happen.

[00:11:54] Now they got the public on CNN, just having a field day going, ‘Yeah,’ and I’m not going to hear the end of this.

[00:12:04] If he would have said, ‘Look, I got a hoarse voice but I will do my best for this debate,’ then I think he would have had more sympathy and more support, but he didn’t say anything, and that’s just a detriment. You know, like I said, I have been on Newsday, where my voice has been like this the whole time, and horrible, and I know it’s horrible, and I’ll do Newsday anyhow, but I’ll tell my listeners, ‘My voice is all scratchy, pardon me, I’m terrible at this today, but here I go.’

[00:12:39] And if he would have done that in the beginning, he would have been so much better off, but he didn’t do that. And, you know, he might come back like a dynamo for September, which God willing he does, but in the meantime, wow. We’ve got three months of this and I fight the Trumplicans, the MAGAbillies all the time on Facebook.

[00:13:06] This is going to be quite the uphill fight because there’s not a lot I can say, you know? ‘Yeah, he was asleep, but—’ That’s not going to go over too well.

[00:13:16] ‘A Democratic party official on Biden’s performance: Nothing good.’ They shouldn’t have put him up there like that. That was just, where was the coffee? Jeez, this is, yeah, wow. I just, I cannot believe that they put him up like that. They knew well that he was like that before they started the debate. They’ve got to have known. But they put him up there like that anyhow.

[00:13:48] John Q: Richard Self from KEPW Newsday called attention to it before the debate, when he noted that neither candidate would use a teleprompter, and he worried that this would affect Joe Biden’s performance.

Just as Richard predicted, where a teleprompter would have allowed for a strong closing statement, President Biden stumbled and trailed off instead.

We’ll take this moment to recognize those who negotiated this seemingly insignificant detail: no teleprompter. This small footnote in the debate rules may have just affected the course of American history.

Listen to KEPW Newsday every Tuesday through Friday at 12:30 p.m. on KEPW 97.3, simulcasting at KEPW.org, where you can also listen on demand to selected programs.