It's true that a lot of Biden's problems have to do with getting the words out but he also flatass didn't have the basic agility to respond to Trump bragging about his record stock market by pointing out that the stock market is much higher now
Regardless of cognitive decline, dude has always been a walking malapropism machine and not a particularly deft politician. He was recruited to be an acceptable (read: non-Bernie) non-Trump, and I find it a little surprising that anybody else is surprised that he sucks as a campaigner.
I just get the feeling that he and the people around him don't have a strong grasp on what the actual situation is or how to think and talk about it, and they thought about the debate as some sort of formalized structured game where Trump says this but I say that
The way he stumbled through about 3 non sequiturs in trying to respond about abortion was mind-boggling. It’s clearly the biggest issue in this campaign for a lot of people. How do you not have a 30-second pat answer for that by now?
Setting aside performance, his whole strategy for the debate was completely out-of-wack. As Politico reported and Biden discussed on ABC, he crammed his head full of info as if he’d rack up points for the number of true facts he stated and then seemed surprised by Trump’s lying.
The thing that most worried me in the debate is when he pivoted from an abortion question that should be a home run for Democrats to talking about undocumented immigrants murdering women.