One week later, the customer came into the showroom demanding to know where his TV was. I repeated what I had said to him, that it would be in stock in a week or two, but he cut me off. "You never said anything about two weeks. There's no way I would ever wait that long when I could've gotten it from someone else. Where's your manager?"
I proceeded to get my manager, who calmed down the customer and agreed to ship it to him at no additional charge. Mollified, he grudgingly left the store and, just as my boss had predicted, one week later the set arrived in the warehouse and was promptly shipped out to the customer.
My boss, however, had some choice words for me. "If I say something is going to take one to two weeks to arrive, you tell the customer two weeks. If you say one to two weeks, the customer stops listening after one and you end up creating a nightmare for yourself."
Turns out he was right, and I never made that mistake again. Pity, Joe Biden didn't work for my boss. If he had, he might've saved himself from a self-inflicted wound he endured last night at the presidential debate; a wound that could prove to be costly in a couple of weeks.
By now, you probably know what I'm referring to. The moment in question occurred near the end of the debate, which only makes it worse because, apart from the closing statements, it was the last thing the audience heard from both men.
When asked by Trump if he would close down the old industry, Biden replied, "Yes, I would transition."
Let me translate for the uninitiated. "When will my TV set be in?" "In a week or two." All my customer heard was one week, not two. And I can assure you that the millions of people who live in western Pennsylvania, Ohio and Texas, heard Biden say the word "yes" and nothing else.
People are funny. They have selective hearing. Yes, Biden clarified his remarks and, yes, Biden is on record as not wanting to ban fracking. His detailed plan calls for a gradual transition away from fossil fuels to renewables. It's on his website. I know, I checked it out.
But when you're in a heated debate with a man who's one, lone talent is baiting people into committing these kinds of blunders and you have the kind of lead Biden does, the best thing to do is to say nothing. Mistakes of omission are almost always preferable to mistakes of commission. It's impossible to run an attack ad if you have nothing to attack. Well, guess what? The Trump campaign now has something they can legitimately attack Biden on.
Let's be honest here for a minute. This was not a particularly strong debate performance for the former VP. I thought he looked tired at times. His answers were anything but sharp and there were moments when he let Trump off the hook that I was, quite frankly, aghast at. For instance, when Trump asked Biden what he and Obama had done regarding undocumented immigrants, I couldn't believe Biden didn't remember the bi-partisan Senate bill that was co-sponsored by Marco Rubio that provided a pathway to citizenship for eleven million people that the Republican-led House wouldn't even take up. It was like Trump served up a hanging breaking ball and Biden never took the bat off his shoulder.
We have no way of knowing what impact, if any, Biden's slip of the tongue will have on the trajectory of this race. Who knows, maybe it amounts to nothing. After all, Trump told so many whoppers last night, it's quite possible that by the time we got to the oil industry exchange, most of the audience had already tuned out. To say that Trump lies as often as a drunken sailor would be to do a disservice to drunken sailors everywhere. The man has all the discipline of a four-year old with his hand caught in a cookie jar.
And as I've said many times - and it bears repeating - the percentage of undecided voters in this election isn't nearly as high as it was four years ago. Really, how many people are even persuadable at this point? But here's the problem for Biden. The polling in states like Pennsylvania is a lot tighter than it is across the country. The RCP average in the Keystone state shows Biden ahead by just 5 points, and with no early in-person voting allowed, that means that any built-in advantage Biden has with mail-in ballots might not be enough to offset the deluge that will almost certainly occur on November 3.
If we start to see Biden's polling average slip a couple of points over the next few days that means the state is up for grabs. And keep in mind, all Trump has to do is hold on to one of the three states that he took from Hillary in 2016 and he wins reelection. That is, of course, assuming Biden doesn't win Florida, which he might. In that case, never mind.
The point is that Biden walked right into Trump's trap. He was minutes away from getting off the stage with a tie. And a tie almost certainly would've meant the end of any hopes this president has of remaining in power. Now, thanks to a momentary lapse in judgment from a man who should've known better, he has an opening; an opening he doesn't deserve.
Face it, Joe Biden has always had a propensity for speaking a second or two before his brain had a chance to catch up with him. It's been a hallmark of his. Up until now, he hasn't had to pay a price for it.
How ironic. It was almost four years ago to the day that James Comey delivered the October surprise that cost Hillary Clinton the White House. Last night, we witnessed another October surprise, so to speak, only this one was delivered by the man looking to defeat the beneficiary of Comey's largess.
Perhaps I'm overreacting. Biden did have some good moments in the debate. Like when he said we can walk and chew gum at the same time. For voters who are rightly appalled at Trump's cavalier attitude towards the Coronavirus but are anxious about whether a future Biden administration would shut down the country to combat it, that had to be reassuring. And for a majority of Americans, the pandemic and the economy are the top two campaign issues. Everything else is a distant third, fourth and fifth. That includes all the Hunter Biden bullshit, which you can expect Trump to keep shoveling between now and doomsday. That's the problem with living in a make believe world with "alternative" facts. It prevents you from being able to see the truth.
And when it comes to truth, Trump knows as much about that as he does about windmills.
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