Even with ten candidates participating, three hours is a long time for a televised political debate, and Thursday night’s Democratic gabfest, in Houston, occasionally got a bit wacky. Early on, the businessman Andrew Yang announced that his campaign would give ten Americans a “freedom dividend” of a thousand dollars a month for the next year. Yang is running on promoting a universal basic income, but the idea of a Presidential candidate forking over twelve grand to a group of lucky voters who happened to be watching prompted the New York Times to ask, “Is that legal?”

Later on, Senator Kamala Harris, of California, in response to a question about trade policy, appeared to suggest that President Donald Trump’s reproductive organ isn’t as large as advertised. Trump “reminds me of that guy in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ you know, when you pull back the curtain, it’s a really small dude,” Harris quipped, smiling wickedly. (George Stephanopoulos, of ABC News, who was one of the moderators, stared at Harris and responded, “I’m not even going to take the bait.”) Toward the end of the debate, there was another discombobulating moment, when Joe Biden, the former Vice-President, was asked if he supported reparations for slavery. Rather than answering the question, Biden gave a rambling answer, in which he started out by acknowledging “institutional segregation” but then veered into a discussion of hiring more psychologists and social workers to help the parents of young children “make sure you have the record player on at night—make sure that kids hear words.”

At a minimum, this was a very awkward answer. Had Biden really suggested that the parents of children in segregated areas “don’t quite know what to do.” He used those words, too. And what about the reference to a “record player”? Was this a subtle ploy by Biden to steal away Bernie Sanders’s vinyl-loving millennial hipsters? No, Biden was referring to some serious research that shows children from low-income families get a lot less exposure than well-off kids to the the spoken (or sung) word, which playing music at night could conceivably address. But he mangled the delivery, as he so often does, signalling, at best, that his technological clock stopped sometime around when the Jackson 5 broke up.

The evening wasn’t all negative for the Democratic front-runner, however—not by any means. Although quite a bit of the immediate post-debate punditry focussed on his verbal lapses, which also included momentarily referring to Sanders, a senator from Vermont, as “the President,” he started out pretty strongly and scored some points throughout. Compared to his performance in the previous debates, he seemed better prepared, more comfortable with the format, and more engaged. In his opening statement, he cited J.F.K. and issued a Kennedyesque appeal to American optimism. “We should get moving,” he said. “There’s enormous, enormous opportunities once we get rid of Donald Trump.” This was a bit trite, perhaps, but it was also a reminder that the Democratic Party’s overriding mission in 2020 is to beat Trump. Of course, that is the raison d’être for Biden’s campaign.

In policy terms, Biden staked out the center ground, pushing his plan to expand Obamacare rather than replace it entirely with a public system. He also raised questions about how Sanders would pay for his Medicare for All plan, which Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, the candidate whom many observers regard as Biden’s biggest threat, also supports. Reminding the audience of this link, Biden said, “I know that the Senator says she’s for Bernie. Well, I’m for Barack”—a comment that won’t have harmed his prospects in South Carolina and many other states.

If the former Vice-President’s performance marked an improvement from the earlier debates, it also surely benefitted from diminished expectations. Biden didn’t have much of a response when Sanders pointed out that, under the private-insurance system, the United States pays twice as much per capita on health care as Canada. (“This is America,” Biden said.) He also struggled, as he did in the earlier debates, to defend the Obama Administration’s mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Twice, Univision’s Jorge Ramos, who was one of the night’s four moderators, asked whether this policy had been a mistake. The second time, Biden said, “The President did the best thing that was able to be done at the time.” Ramos pressed on, asking, “How about you?” To which Biden responded, “I’m the Vice-President of the United States.”

Julián Castro, who was a Cabinet secretary in the Obama Administration, pointed out that Biden was trying to have it both ways: taking credit for Obama’s popular policies and distancing himself from the unpopular ones. But the force of this critique was lessened by the fact that Castro had already demonstrated his intention to take down the front-runner by any means necessary, including openly questioning his mental faculties. “Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?” Castro, who has been languishing in the polls, asked Biden during a back-and-forth about health insurance. Castro’s tone was harsh, and he also appears to have overreached. After examining the transcript, Amber Phillips, of the Washington Post, wrote, “Biden didn’t actually forget anything. At least, not on the substance of the policy.”

Biden certainly wasn’t great. But his candidacy is posited on the theory that he doesn’t have to be a great debater. At this stage, his advisers know that they are unlikely to win over many progressive activists or dominate the highly educated demographic that has gravitated to Warren. Their strategy is to shore up Biden’s support among the rest of the Democratic alliance, including moderates, minorities, and whites who didn’t complete college. To this end, they are relying on his reputation as a centrist, his ties to Obama, and the good will he has built up over the years. Despite an uneven performance on Thursday night, Biden didn’t upend this strategy.

Arguably, his best moment came near the end, when all the candidates were asked about the most significant professional setbacks they had faced. Biden talked movingly about overcoming the death of his first wife and daughter in a car accident, and, more recently, of losing his eldest son, Beau, to cancer, by “finding purpose” and staying engaged in public life. If he had left it there, it would have been a perfectly good response. But he went on to shift the discussion beyond himself. “There’s a lot of people been through a lot worse than I have, who get up every single morning, put their feet one foot in front of another, without the help I had,” he said. “There are real heroes out there. Some real heroes.” Earlier this week, my colleague Benjamin Wallace-Wells asked if Biden could remind Democrats what they liked about him. At least in this moment, he did.