In separate ways, Jill Biden and Kamala Harris raise the specter of a Trump presidency.

Follow this authorKathleen Parker's opinions

Then she turns back to the crowd and screams, “And what did Donald Trump do? He LIED!” It was not her best moment.

Jill Biden has appeared for a while to be running the show and, therefore, the country — though I don’t recall seeing her name on the 2020 ballot. It’s clear she is pushing her husband to stay in the race, probably not eager to retreat to Delaware with a man whose years have caught up with him. It happens. Age sweeps in the front door and, faster than you can say “Scranton,” turns a previously vigorous, intelligent person into a stranger content to watch dust particles do the hokey pokey in a shaft of sunlight.

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Never mind the stroke-of-midnight end to first ladies’ status — the White House residence, staff, stylists and magazine covers. It was for former first ladies that “Cinderella” was written.

Herr Trump, meanwhile, is a recently convicted felon who benefits only by comparison with Biden’s performance. Trump’s lies far exceeded Biden’s, according to the folks who fact-check so we don’t have to. But at least he was wide-awake and, for him, relatively controlled. If only he had kept his vitriol to a simmer rather than a low boil. Instead, he shot back at a clearly faltering Biden and looked, as ever, like a back-alley bully.

Biden, as nearly everyone has noted, couldn’t form intelligible sentences. At times, he entered the stare zone where the brain searches desperately for a GPS to tell him where he is. As I’ve written during the past 3½ years, it was painful to watch. Almost as painful as listening to Kamala D. Harris try to ground her thoughts in sentences. Most of the time, she sounds as though she’s leading a séance. A speech she gave at Howard University last year makes the point:

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“So I think it’s very important — as you have heard from so many incredible leaders — for us, at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it........

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