Well of course it worked, Circe! The question you should be asking yourself is whether that is a good thing? We have candidates RUN for office! It's a gauntlet of sorts. A marathon during which you prove that you have the stamina to DO the hardest job on the planet! Has Joe Biden proven that? Has he been grilled with tough questions from the media and his opponents? We have someone who's possibly about to be our President and we're really not sure if he's mentally or physically able to do the job. That's not the system "working"...that's the system breaking down because the media didn't do their jobs!
You make a good point that we can't be sure Biden is up to the job. But we strongly suspect he is not --- and besides the idea that commie Harris will replace him (by June, my husband keeps saying), I'm not sure that matters. After all, several presidents have died early, others were ill or crippled ---- good health and youth are not a prerequisite for the job.
I definitely don't mind that they didn't go thru your marathon campaign. The most important reason I like Trump, perhaps, is that he creatively re-imagines pretty much everything political, and that is fascinating and liberating. We don't have to do things just because we've always done it that way! Trump's creativity is amazing. Okay, Biden took a page out of that book and was early-19th-century in his style of running. He was a sacrificial candidate anyway: there was no WAY Biden would have won if it hadn't been for this coronavirus. So he kept his health ----- and actually ended up narrowly winning, apparently.
As for the media "doing their jobs" ---- the media is a bunch of thugs and low-minded hacks, in my opinion. They don't have a job, except for collecting more clicks for their employers to make more money. We used to think the press had an important place, but no longer. We were naive and they had snowed us.