I let my 9-year-old watch the debate. It was a mistake.

The first words out of her mouth were, “She looks so old!” And that’s really all you need to know about the first (and likely last) presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump—the first impressions of a fourth-grade girl in Brooklyn who had never watched a debate in her life. It wasn’t an example of an unacknowledged truth that slips from the mouths of children; rather, it was a universal reaction, a devastating moment that upended the race and led to a wave of calls for Biden to resign. And there’s a part of me that regrets having to experience it.

There’s also something in me that’s glad she did it. With a vague memory of the first debate I ever watched, between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, long ago, while visiting relatives in Washington, D.C., I naturally asked who we should keep our fingers crossed for. “We are Democrats,” my father said, his tone tinged with disapproval, as if even considering voting Republican was tantamount to betraying our values ​​and ideals—who we were. That’s about all I remember from that night, pretty typical of an Irish-American liberal family on the East Coast. (To learn about my family’s political views, I recently attended a gathering where one of my uncles was wearing a “Free Wednesdays” T-shirt, something I had never seen in person before.) But it was also formative, because this is how political and tribal identities are formed, with the sepia glow of the TV set and us all nervously praying that a guy named Dukakis will beat a guy named Bush.

Apart from instilling a life of frustration and disappointment in my daughter – after last night I was reminded of the banners hanging on the street. The Simpsons DNC’s version of “We Hate Life and Ourselves” and “We Cannot Govern” – I also wanted to introduce her to the strange glory of American democracy in action, so that she could experience for herself this grim spectacle that has long fascinated me and which unexpectedly became the focus of my career. Debate is a civics lesson, a democratic process boiled down to the basics in which two opponents argue their point to voters, except that it is coupled with a kind of gladiatorial display that makes politics absurd, stupid and addictive – which makes it entertainment. I wanted to show her that being interested in politics can be great fun.

Except it was the opposite of fun. From the moment Biden opened his mouth, letting out a hazy whisper from the ancient cave of his throat, I started moaning on the couch. “What’s going on?” – she asked. She asked the question again and again as I squirmed and clutched my head in response to Biden, who hesitated for what seemed like an eternity between words, his sentences fading into streams of garbled thought. “It shouldn’t be like this,” was what I kept saying as an explanation, even though she had no idea what it was supposed to be like. Even worse, in my opinion, were the moments when Biden wasn’t talking, when Trump was saying every crazy and hateful thing in his head with great verve and conviction, and the split screen showed Biden staring unblinking into the distance as if he was caught in the web of his his own dreams, which is another way of saying to the network of his old age.

My daughter went to bed before the debate was over, and the next morning the first thing she said was, “Who won?” Well, Trump won, I told her, and his victory was so decisive that now we will have to determine whether Biden can remain at the top of the ticket. She threw hers away The Simpsons reference, saying that Biden could be like Mr. Burns in the episode where he gets injections that allow him to live forever but force him to say “I bring you love” in a squeaky voice. In fact, I said, my friend said she’d rather have an Undead Biden than a Living-and-Breathing Trump in the White House, and naturally I feel the same way, but that it doesn’t seem responsible to vote for someone who has clearly deteriorated over the course of the last four years and will undoubtedly get even worse in the next four. And so the morning passed, which seems to prove that letting her watch the debate was, overall, a positive outcome, both in terms of real-world knowledge gained and father-daughter bonding.

But there was a moment when she watched these two men on screen and she just felt bad, for lack of a better word. Of course, there was direct exposure to Trump, which always gives the impression of playing with some radioactive substance. But it was also disheartening to see a young person witnessing such a humiliating stumble by Biden as if they were unknowingly watching some form of abuse. How could these two infirm creatures arguing over golf be our only option? How could Democrats let this happen? I kept telling her, “It shouldn’t be like this,” but this Is what it is. And what’s worse – at least for people like us, who have been led to believe that we are somehow deeply and meaningfully connected to the Democrats – is that we are.