I agree that Rachel was too easy, slow, inadequate. But I believe that it was because of her inadequacies, that the country and Sen. Graham began to feel so helpless that Graham was able to express everyone’s frustration. If the senators had questioned Ford themselves, I doubt the build up and then the Graham “speech” would have happened. We needed Graham’s speech! It pulled us all together.
I think Graham spoke exactly as planned. As Mitchell was questioning Kavanaugh before Durbin’s turn, I noticed that she was coming to the last page from which she was reading her questions, and at the end of her questioning, she turned the pile upside down. That made me wonder what she was going to do after Durbin’s five minutes. Did she have another stack of papers with additional questions? When Graham started speaking, I realized that it was planned that she would ask no additional questions.