One-on-one debates like Thursday’s are exclusively about tail risk. The eight-way cage matches of the primaries can at least plausibly claim to be about “introducing your candidate” to the viewing public, with the implication that you might as well swing for the fences to be noticed. Trump did this masterfully in the 2016 primary debates, where he began by pounding his biggest would-be competitor into a pulp before dismantling the rest of the field. But once it’s mano-a-mano and you’re guaranteed roughy equal facetime, it’s mostly about risk mitigation.
Add to this that politicians are naturally risk-adverse, and not trained in the kind of instantaneous verbal sparring you need in order to push the envelope, and you have a recipe for a boring encounter. We remember “bits” from previous debates mostly because of their rarity, and often only when they are subsequently satirized.
So the only interesting question ends up being if anything interesting is going to happen – specifically, anything ruinous. Trump, being an experienced television personality with decades of extemporaneous speaking chops, was unlikely ex ante to make a fool of himself, although the risk was always that he would allow himself to be taken advantage of by the bizarre moderation setup and his ideological opponents’ control of moderation.
Biden, by contrast, was expected to be in a race between the elasticity of his battered cerebral blood vessels and the adrenochrome/vitamin cocktail flooding through his system. Until you’ve hung out with some fairly substantial people, you have no idea the sheer quality of high-end medical care available or precisely what you can deliver for a 90 minute tune-up, if you don’t have to do it night after night, and don’t mind knocking off a few months of life expectency in the worst case. Even four years of straight-up speedballs is totally tolerable if you really need to steady your nerves to do your best work – just ask Jerry Garcia. On the other hand, Jerry wasn’t 81 with multiple brain aneurysms under his belt already.
So there was a reason CNN insistend on a full two minute live delay on the proceedings, without even a single ideologically friendly White House pool reporter in the audience – how long do you need to recognize a drooped eyebrow, a lagging tongue, unusually slurred speech? Experiencing some, uh, technical difficulties. Absent that, you shoot for a draw.
But Biden could not pull it off. Slurring and stumbling over his words, rasping, repeatedly relying on canned rhetorical filler (“number one. number two.” “and by the way.” “the idea that.”) and eventually concluding with a full “and by the way… [vacant stare]”. Unforced errors where he repeatedly focused on the economy, his area of primary weakness. Blunders like stuttering into “beating Medicare”. Unprompted, bringing up American citizens being murdered by illegals, giving Trump layup after layup. A physical performance of shuffling and staring, showing off his bizarre facelift topography time after time. Short of literally shitting his pants, this was as bad as it could possibly have gone.
Trump by contrast put in an adequate performance. Refusing to scare the hoes on abortion, his primary weakness with the white female swing demographic (“follow your heart”), ignoring questions where convenient in favor of repeated attacks, and a neat maneuver where for simple answers he would wail on Biden for the first minute and allow the hosts to re-prompt him so he could say the obvious thing.
In the aftermath, “panic” was the word repeatedly used. CNN implies it’s elder abuse. They beg the DNC to swap this guy out (for Kamala? lmao). “If you genuinely believe democracy is at stake, how can you let this happen?” (spoiler: they don’t, and they will).
CNN’s moderation was, incredibly, fair enough that one suspects they might have seen this coming, and were trying to gently push Grandpa over the cliff. It remains to be seen if the party can possibly maneuver a way for this to happen, but the fact is that Biden has won all the primaries and is still at least physically alive. If his wife was unwilling to pull the plug before he embarrassed himself to this degree, it’s pretty clear she prefers the Lady MacBeth ending to a dignified elder statesman retirement, and there is really no formal mechanism to keep Biden off the ticket as long as he retains his ego – gigantic enough, by the way, that he was able to be baited into lying about his golf game. “C’mon, man” indeed.
One could get conspiratorial and speculate about extra-formal mechanisms to make sure Biden doesn’t drag the rest of the party down with him, but frankly, Trump is probably someone the rest of the uniparty can deal with, and more of a known quantity than Kamala.
At this point in time the likeliest outcome is a repeat of the first Trump term, where lack of institutional support for anything but exclusively executive prerogatives (and inadequate staffing on those) results in an administration that doesn’t threaten left structural power, and can be saddled with the fallout from decades of bad policy.
If you are looking for a point of light on the substance of a second Trump term, it’s this: the moment of the debate that rang truest to me was when Trump insisted, twice, that he would rather not be running. He does have his businesses, his large and loving family, and his apparantly vibrant golf game – and instead of focusing on those when he actuarially has about 10 years left on earth, he is forced to either win or die in prison as the country burns around him.
The hope is that this was not false modesty, and he realizes that his legacy depends on destroying the people that forced a senile figurehead like Biden to take the flak while they loot a sinking ship. They cannot be allowed to do this again.
-By Hank Oslo
Visit The American Sun at The American Sun
