Now that she has enough delegates locked up to secure the nomination, I’m inclining to the theory that the DNC (Obama, donors, et al. ad nauseam) is going to let her run, hope for the best, but fully expect her to lose, so that they can be rid of her forever without raising the hackles of the extreme left. The VP nominee will, accordingly, have to be someone with no real viable political future. Buttjudge maybe? Some loyal, forgotten (and most importantly) white, male party hack?

Being audio only is definitely bizarre. Even if they want to say it is due to the necessity to self-isolate because of COVID, why not have video?

Other oddities: Biden talks far more coherently than he has at any time in the last year, and without any of the pauses or bizarre tangents that were common even before he went into full on dementia. There is a little bit of a back and forth between Kamala and Biden, but that could have easily been pre-arranged.

Possible explanations:

1.) They were able to load up Biden with enough stimulants to get through a couple of minutes of reading with a teleprompter, but the fact that Biden was reading without comprehension was so obvious that they couldn’t show videos. I doubt this though, because Biden hasn’t performed well in the past even with a teleprompter.
2.) It really is Biden, but isn’t a continuous take. Instead they had Biden repeat a prepared speech dozens of times, and then edited out the pauses, slurs, tangents, etc.
3.) AI. Parts of this do resemble what you get from AI, but I doubt this because there are some misstatements such as “you brought them togeth-, you brought us together.” This are the types of misstatements that normal people make, not the same sort of dementia errors that Biden usually makes, but I don’t think someone using AI would intentionally put in such errors. However if they were putting together multiple takes they might do such a thing if there was no take where Biden said the whole sentence right and he was talking too fast in the takes to clearly cut between two words.

A combination of 2 and 3 is also possible, i.e. have Biden do dozens of takes and then use AI to fill in for the parts that he still didn’t get right on any of them.

The accounts which are emerging suggest he was due to be admitted to a Las Vegas hospital, the hospital visit was scotched, and he was then transported across the country (with one reporter saying the plane was shaking it was traveling at such an abnormal speed) to be admitted to Johns Hopkins, then that visit was scotched as well, then he was taken to his house in Delaware. He’s now appeared on Fox boarding a plane.

Art:
As long as Biden is president, the party could (in theory) change its mind on Harris and control who her Veep will be. Once she succeeds Biden, the Veep choice is hers and the nomination likely cinched. Better to play “Weekend at Bernie’s” with whatever’s left of Old Joe.