Can Joe Biden defang Donald Trump on the debate stage? And does it even matter?

[SharonClark]

Interesting article by Heather Digby Parton in Salon today.

... It will be interesting to see how Biden handles all this in the first debate in Cleveland, or whether it will make any difference one way or the other. Trump likes to say that he won the general election debates with Hillary Clinton in 2016, and there even seems to be some conventional wisdom in the press that he's right, but it couldn't be further from truth....

...It occurred to me over the weekend, as I watched the two men closely, that while Trump can accurately be described as that arrogant blowhard at the end of the bar who forces you to move to a table to get away from him, Joe Biden is the fellow at the other end of the bar who's buying everyone drinks and telling funny stories. It could be that he's just the kind of guy who knows how to handle Donald Trump. We'll find out on Tuesday night.

https://www.salon.com/2020/09/28/can-joe-biden-take-down-the-insult-comic-from-mars-and-do-the-debates-even-matter/