During the final 2020 presidential debate on Thursday, Joe Biden made what is perhaps the biggest gaffe in the history of such debates by pledging to bring about the termination of the entire oil industry. As a result, on the following day, the Biden campaign was forced to perform damage control which you can read about in many outlets such as Politico and the Washington Post. Their lame spin is that Biden really didn't mean to end the oil industry, just the subsidies for it. Of course, if you read the transcript of what Biden said, it is obvious that he wanted to both end the oil industry as well as the subsidies, not just the subsidies only.
Therefore it is surreal for anyone writing an analysis of this debate cataloging in detail the "hits" and "misses" that this more than obvious "miss" would be, well, missed. However, when you realize that the one keeping score is none other than the over-the-top Democrat cheerleader at CNN, Chris Cillizza, perhaps it is understandable since he long ago lost even the slightest shred of credibility.
Here is Cillizza completely missing reality on Friday in "Hits and misses from the final presidential debate."
HITS
Joe Biden: The former vice president wasn't perfect. But he did everything he needed to, given his pole position in the race -- and even managed to land the best lines of the night.
You mean the lines about ending the oil industry, Chris? The closest Cillizza gets to referring to that gaffe is mentioning about Biden "misspeaking at times."
And particularly toward the end of the debate, Biden seemed to flag somewhat -- losing his train of thought and misspeaking at times. Biden will never be a great debater, and he wasn't *on* on Thursday night. But he did enough -- more than enough -- to keep the race roughly right where it is. Which is with him as a clear favorite to win on November 3.
And that was it. Somewhere between "losing his train of thought" and "misspeaking at times" came the mother of all gaffes in the history of presidential debates but you wouldn't know what it was by reading Cillizza's account which conveniently avoided mentioning the very thing that is now haunting the Biden campaign.
