Unlike several of his opponents, Joe Biden didn’t offer a sweeping narrative to carry his campaign forward. Photograph by Drew Angerer / Getty

The immediate question is this: Just how much damage did the second Democratic debate do to the campaign of the front-runner, Joe Biden? Only opinion polls conducted in the next few weeks will provide a definitive answer. Since entering the primary, in April, Biden has said a number of things that provoked outrage in progressive circles and shrugs from more moderate Democratic voters. We’ll have to wait and see if Biden’s heated exchange about race and busing with Kamala Harris provokes a different response. But one thing cannot be contested. Considering the debate over all, Biden’s performance raised fresh doubts about his preparation, age, grasp of the environment in which he is operating, and basic political skills.

Things started out badly for him and went downhill from there. The first question he received was a request to explain what he meant when he told the well-heeled guests at a New York fund-raiser recently that nobody should “demonize the rich,” and “Nobody has to be punished. . . . No one’s standard of living would change.” The mere fact that such a question could be posed was a signal of problems in the former Vice-President’s campaign. If you are going to invite reporters to your high-dollar fund-raisers, as Biden did as a gesture toward transparency, common sense should prevent you from saying anything that would embarrass you if it were printed in the newspapers. Evidently, Biden’s self-preservation instincts have withered, or perhaps he didn’t read the memo that reporters would be present.

A third possibility is that he actually thinks that no high earners would feel the bite under a Biden Administration. But this clashes with his pledges to reverse the Trump tax cuts, eliminate $1.6 trillion in separate tax loopholes enjoyed by the rich, and lock up the C.E.O.s of drug companies that peddle opiates. As the debate went on, he would get around to reiterating these pledges, but not before floundering in his initial response to the question about his statements at the fund-raiser. “What I meant by that is, look, Donald Trump thinks Wall Street built America. Ordinary, middle-class Americans built America,” he said. The answer was absurd on its face.

This was but the first of several instances in which Biden didn’t appear to have prepared for a question, or provocation, that members of his campaign team, if not he personally, must have known was coming. In another early exchange, Representative Eric Swalwell, one of the minnows in the field, recalled that, when he was six years old, a political candidate came to the California Democratic Convention and said, “It’s time to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans.” After pausing, Swalwell went on, saying, “That candidate was then Senator Joe Biden.”

One way for a seventy-six-year-old like Biden to respond to the age issue would be to tackle it directly—to talk about his energy and vigor, and so on. Another strategy, which a seventy-three-year-old Ronald Reagan adopted during a 1984 debate with his Democratic opponent, Walter Mondale, is to make fun of the question. Or Biden could have acknowledged his advancing years and made the state-of-emergency argument that, just this one time, the country should set aside the claims of youth and nominate an old-timer who can beat Donald Trump. For some reason, he didn’t do any of these things. He ignored the jibe from Swalwell and launched into a discussion of how to prepare young people for the coming age of automation. Inevitably, the impression he gave was that his age was something he didn’t want to discuss.

The first hint that Harris had him in her sights came when she distanced herself from the Obama Administration’s mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. When Harris went in for the kill on Biden’s warm recollection of working with segregationist senators, and his efforts, during the nineteen-seventies, to resist federally imposed busing, she personalized her remarks by telling the story of a young girl bused to integrate public schools in Berkeley, California, and adding, “That little girl was me.” Even allowing for Harris’s verbal skill, and the audaciousness of her attack, though, Biden’s response indicated a worrying inability to think on his feet.

The right and wise course would have been to acknowledge Harris’s personal experience. If he couldn’t bring himself simply to say he was sorry for the position he took, he could perhaps have pointed out that these events took place a very long time ago; that both he and the world have changed a lot in the interim; and that if he were given the opportunity to turn back the clock, he might well do some things differently. Instead of trying to defuse the exchange, he fell back on some of the arguments about local rights that conservative white politicians made forty-five years ago, and Harris promptly called him out on it.

Even after all this, Biden may have been able to salvage something from the night if he had provided a more arresting vision of a Biden Presidency. His description of his health-care plan was vague. He talked about restoring America’s soul, but didn’t say very much about rebuilding its infrastructure and industrial base, two issues that he has previously emphasized. In response to a question about what he would do about guns, he gave a fairly strong answer, only to step on it at the end by remarking, “Our enemy is the gun manufacturers, not the N.R.A., the gun manufacturers”—as if the two pillars of the gun lobby could be separated.

Unlike Bernie Sanders and, in the previous debate, Elizabeth Warren, Biden didn’t offer a sweeping narrative to carry his campaign forward. He failed to match the intellectual wattage of Pete Buttigieg, whose evisceration of the G.O.P.’s claim to be a religious party was something to see. He didn’t show the unbridled confidence and killer instinct of Harris. Repeatedly, he fell back on the record of the Obama Administration, even bringing it up when he was asked what he would make his first issue as President. Then he pivoted, saying, “But the first thing I would do is make sure that we defeat Donald Trump, period.”

Electability is the primary rationale for Biden’s candidacy, of course. Given his wealth of experience and ability to attract support from a number of voting groups, including minorities and working-class whites, he is the Democrat best placed to take down Trump, his supporters argue. In Presidential campaigns, however, demographics aren’t necessarily destiny. Political skills count for a lot, too—the capacity to sustain a gruelling schedule for a year and a half, deliver a distinctive message, come across well on television, avoid gaffes, rally party activists, and confront an opponent. On all of these fronts, Biden’s performance on Thursday night was far from reassuring.