By Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog

US pundits may adore the presidential debates, but political scientists have concluded that “…when it comes to shifting enough votes to decide the outcome of the election, presidential debates have rarely, if ever, mattered.”

That’s absolutely not the case in 2020 – politics is not at all a “science”, of course.

The most important issue in the US today is, incredibly, largely banned from corporate media discourse: Has Joe Biden become too senile to be president?

This is the first topic anyone brings up whenever I ask them about Biden, proving that the intelligence of the average American is too often unfairly denigrated: it should indeed be unthinkable to vote for someone who has been unfortunately beset by old-age dementia. The nation’s highest office cannot be held by someone who can be easily manipulated or who needs to be told what to do.

Despite the fact that everyone here is taking about Biden’s mental health, the MSM and 1% is trying to make it seem like this is just another Russian disinformation campaign.

The denizens of “the Swamp” have controversially insisted for four years that Trump was “unfit for office” – ironically, the 2020 debates will be so unprecedentedly critical because they could shockingly prove that their own candidate is indisputably unfit.

Biden certainly shows very worrying signs of having aged out of civil service. It’s well-known that he has to overcome a regular stutter, but Democrat partisans foolishly believe that the average voter can’t tell the difference between a stammer and serious cognitive decline.

At the Democratic National Convention everyone watched Biden’s speech with baited breath – not because he is such an inspiring candidate but because many expected a mental car crash due to his rumoured senility. I thought his speech was delivered in an incredibly grim manner – he was obviously concentrating like mad just to correctly read the teleprompter, which necessarily excluded the space for inspiration and emotion.

The very first note relayed by CNN’s anchor after the speech reflected the dementia concerns – relief that Biden had only one “senior moment”. Viewers were then instructed that this is what constitutes success for a presidential candidate.

The worries over cognitive decline explain why people are not expecting Biden to win the debates, per recent polls. Many expect Trump to run over him. “Victory” for Biden will thus be the same as his convention speech – avoid “senior moments” which would undeniably disqualify him.

One cannot understate how this very uninspirational candidate is contributing to the incredible, deadly, ever-more shocking malaise in the US this year. Biden has been unsuccessfully running for the presidency since 1988 – why would Americans look forward to the next four years with the long-unwanted and now possibly senile Biden?

What also cannot be understated is how appalling it is that the leading US presidential candidate has been so very absent from the public eye, and for so very long, and despite so many legitimate questions about possible dementia. Sequestering Biden is a dangerous game, and not only because isolation has had such a negative effect on countless seniors during this pandemic: Should Biden get elected and we see his senility increase, how can Americans not react with more political alienation and apathy towards a chattering class which would have to be found guilty of covering for Biden?

The debates are going to have such a record impact because it’s the only chance Americans will have to answer urgent and well-founded questions about a “Hiden’ Biden” who has not been intellectually tested in months.

But how can it be that in the so-called “leader of the free world” voters only get to see their future leader three times?

Americans are essentially being told that they should accept the private decision of the political elite which surrounds Biden that he is indeed intellectually capable of being president – this is not “direct democracy” but “indirect democracy”, and a most curious one. “Indirect democracy with American characteristics” not only isn’t exportable, it’s not even a model Americans themselves want.

Pity the poor American: they have fair questions about their leading presidential candidate, but his privileges are so extraordinary that he doesn’t have to deign to respond. Europeans can sympathise, as there is a clear parallel here with the refusal to heed their repeated rejections of right-wing austerity imposed by Brussels.

Some Americans claim that Trump shows the decline of the American and Western model, but could he really be worse than the daily spectacle of a senile president for four years?

No wonder the US is in chaos during this “summer of fear”- the future proposed by their political and intellectual elite looks dangerously feeble.

Ramin Mazaheri is currently covering the US elections. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.