Uh, he didn’t just have a raspy voice. He was mixing up words, rambling, even struggling to put full sentences together at points. And when he wasn’t talking he looked to be spacing out at times, just trying to hold it together at others. His performance was as if he was fighting a very high fever, a migraine, and/or was trying not to puke the entire debate. I totally believe reports that he had a minor illness and was having an off day as a result, but unless he had something like the flu (in which case he wouldn’t have been allowed on stage, certainly not that close to Trump) it would be completely reasonable to expect him to perform much better even while sick. And that matters, because as president you don’t get to take a sick day; shit goes down and you need to be there for it. Maybe he’s not too old to be president on days when he’s feeling well, but he looked completely incapable of handling any kind of sudden crisis in his condition last night.
Obligatory: assuming he’s still the nominee I’m voting for Biden in November anyway because all the alternatives suck more.
The people who have fallen behind the most are the ones who don’t realize they’ve fallen behind. “What you know you don’t know, versus what you don’t know you don’t know” and all that. They are also the people least open to catching up when the opportunity presents itself; if you think best practices haven’t changed since you were initially trained, why would you even entertain any information that contradicts what you initially learned? Part of this is ego, as it would require admitting that you’ve been doing it wrong this whole time (so instead these people keep doing it wrong as some kind of sunk cost fallacy).