The New Yorker:

The known bad candidate is better than the chaos of the unknown.

By Jay Caspian Kang

There is an unattributed maxim in sports that says the backup quarterback is the most popular man in town. The idea is that fans will inevitably begin to pick apart the starter and blame him for everything that goes wrong. If the team starts losing, fans start fantasizing about the backup and imbuing him with abilities he likely doesn’t have. See that interception the starter threw across the middle? The backup would never have thrown that because he’s not a glory hog like the starter.

The problem, of course, is that the backup usually is much worse at football than the starter, even if he has provided some tantalizing glimpses in the short stints where he takes the field. If he actually has to play the starter’s role, he will quickly remind you why he’s the backup.

Like pretty much everyone who watched the first Presidential debate between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, I was stunned by Biden’s incoherence and his inability to put together sentences on air. It was hard not to immediately think back to the clips we had been seeing on social media throughout the past few months—the ones that many said had been selectively edited and were misleading. Those snippets showed the President in what appeared to be a state of distress and unable to finish many of his sentences.

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