TV can't deal with the fact that one person is kind of old and past it and the other is an active enemy of every American norm, value and ideal.

They can't cope with that. So it has say well you know it's a little this little

of that it's crest and Colgate when in fact it's actually Colgate versus arsenic.

Welcome to Beg to

Beg to Differ, the Bullworks Weekly Roundtable discussion featuring civil

conversation across the political spectrum.

We range from center left to center right. I'm Mona Charon's indicated

columnist and policy editor at the Bulwark and I'm joined by our regulars

Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution in the Wall Street Journal, Damon Linker, who writes

the sub-stack newsletter notes from the middle ground, and Linda Chavez of the Niskanin Center.

Our special guest this week is Atlantic contributor, David Fromm, author most recently of the book Chumpoculips,

more relevant than ever now. We are coming to you a day late this week because we delayed doing this show until after the debate.

And that will indeed be topic number one.

Where to begin?

From the first minutes of this debacle,

Biden walked to the podium. He looked decrepit. He looked like he was having a truly difficult time, just maneuvering from the wings to the podium and it went downhill from there.

And so I want to give, for any of, listeners, who did not listen to the debate

or watch it.

Let's just give a flavor of the early part of the debate,

which was the weakest, because then you know first

impressions tend to harden and also people tune out after the first half hour or so. And so Biden was asked a question and this was his response.

He had the largest national debt of any president in four-year period, number one.

...