For all the people who are upset about last night’s horrible debate, they should pause and ask themselves: wasn’t that just an accurate reflection of where we are as a nation? Two septuagenarians bashing each other with bursts of bombastic bullshittery and competing whatabouts is the content you will find on Facebook and cable news every single day. To the extent people are disappointed, remind yourself: these men both have nearly 90 percent ratings with the two largest political parties in America. They both bested huge fields of candidates to get their respective roles. This is the show you asked for, and you got it.
I rewatched the 2016 debates in anticipation of this one and one of the things you discover is that even as Hillary Clinton was consistently winning on points and substance, Donald Trump was winning the key moments that stood out. Along the way, while you may remember “you’d be in jail”, this was actually a substantive series of debates - including Chris Wallace’s! - where you learned things from both candidates and heard commitments about what they’d do as president.
This was not the case last night. From just a few minutes in, it was clear that Joe Biden was being Joe Biden - not the manufactured statesman who represents a return to normalcy and rising above the muck, but the pompous Delaware Senator who insults people, interrupts, refuses to engage, and engages in a milder Mid-Atlantic form of Trump’s New York bombast, repeatedly calling the president a “clown”, saying “shut up man”, and calling him “the worst president America has ever had” - far from the redemptive offering his prepackaged campaign has presented to the country. http://vlt.tc/4352
Perhaps there was nothing Wallace could have done in this situation, but his choice to engage repeatedly just didn’t work. It resulted in repeated instances of Biden talking for two minutes in which he’d throw out multiple claims about Trump, Trump would interrupt with a rejoinder, Wallace would tell Trump to stop talking, and then at the end of the two minutes Wallace would move on to the next question. Trump, infuriated, would bulldoze him and respond anyway. Biden would interrupt with his denial. And on and on.
The result was utterly unsatisfying. Rather than allow the two men to batter each other, Wallace kept trying to seize control. This is, in fairness, in his manner. Having done Fox News Sunday quite a lot during his tenure, I know that he runs one of the most strict panels in the business. He does not like cross-talk or interrupting, he wants order from his panelists, and he will quickly shut you down if you engage in that type of heated back and forth.
This is an old school approach to television panels, and not one that I personally favor because I think it’s less interesting than television where people can jump in and argue. But regardless of preference, it’s also one that just doesn’t work when you have not one but two candidates who don’t respect the rules and meander from subject to subject in avoidance of questions.
This isn’t to say I could’ve done a better job! Wallace’s position was untenable, equipped with a sequence of rules and agreed upon formats and segments that was blown out of the water. But when the candidates are beating the crap out of each other over an issue, you don’t get the plot back by insisting they shift to forest management and electric cars. And if you’re going to shut down the president by teasing a question that never comes, it should probably be on an issue of less significance than Roe v. Wade.
Most Republicans will probably go after Wallace for bias. http://vlt.tc/4355 That somewhat misses the point, which is that you can be biased and still moderate a good debate. That said, it’s impossible to avoid the biased nature of many of the questions asked last night. Wallace’s frame of Critical Race Theory as “racial sensitivity training” was particularly egregious. At a time when Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi are best-selling authors getting paid through the roof prices to spout their message, pretending those two things are the same requires a level of ignorance of the subject that is possible only if you still primarily read all the newspapers on paper.
It seems to me a better approach from Wallace would have been to tee up just one question for each segment and then give the candidates more time to batter each other on the subject with the occasional interjection to stick to the point. It’s harder in such a format to just say, as Biden did on packing the Supreme Court, “I'm not going to answer the question.” http://vlt.tc/4362 But that’s assuming that we retain this old-school solo moderator television format, with two minute answers followed by one minute responses, which seems so very tired to me. These old limitations are ridiculous in the age of unlimited bandwidth and three hour podcasts that are 100 million dollar media properties.
A big part of this problem is The Commission on Presidential Debates, which is a relic. Its board consists of Silent Generation and aged Boomer politicians - including one of JFK’s FCC appointees. The Commission's approach creates debates that are unintelligible and with moderators who cannot effectively extract the truth. They are asking 1980s questions in a 1970s format. It is the reason there are no internet based debates. Its executive director, the same since its inception, has led it since before the end of the Cold War.
The olds running the debates must end. The instant feedback poll from CBS News showed 83 percent of voters were dissatisfied, with just 17 percent positive about the debate - and that’s not just the fault of the candidates. http://vlt.tc/435l In an era where we get more enlightenment from Charlamagne Tha God interviews and Joe Rogan podcasts than Sunday morning sitdowns, it’s high time we would be much better off with longer answers and a debate format with a minimum of two moderators, one coming from the left and another from the right, asking questions of the candidates that more accurately frame the issues both sides care about. But so long as we have the Commission, that would be a bridge too far.
So, who benefits? It seems to me neither side benefits from last night’s debate, which is good for Joe Biden, because as I wrote yesterday, Donald Trump needs the debates to matter. The only degree to which it benefits Trump is that he successfully did the thing he always does: pull his opponents down into the muck with him. http://vlt.tc/435w “No actual transcription could possibly do justice to these 96 minutes of shouts, insults, interruptions, stray thoughts, and loose babble. It was like witnessing an argument about an arcane procedural rule during a senior bingo night at a nursing home in purgatory. It was vicious, tasteless, witless, and (surprisingly, alas) painfully unfunny.”
Biden’s denials on Hunter’s financial dealings, for instance, rang false when he seemed to fall back onto a “don’t come after my family, buster” attitude and then immediately went after Trump’s family. This muddles the issue and leads to outcomes like this, where 57 percent of people say it’s likely Biden and his inner circle have enriched themselves from his political career. http://vlt.tc/435d
Voters know what they’re getting now with both of these candidates as men, but they really don’t know what they’re getting from them as policies. Biden’s policy answers on the Green New Deal (it does work but he doesn’t support it?), on law and order (getting people in Portland to sit down and talk?), and on what he’d do to reopen (get PPE to schools and businesses but also lockdown until nationwide vaccine?) were particularly muddled, and that’s before you get to the more politically dramatic questions of packing the court and eliminating the filibuster.
Biden’s been winning to this point with that muddle by seeming above the fray, a return to the golden days of 2015. After this debate, it seems clearer that when questioned, this is not what he represents. Essentially, his answer is a non-answer, that Trump is bad and in his absence we will muddle through to normalcy. That does allow a critique of his campaign I would expect Trump to hammer in the next debate, which I assume is being moderated by that young up-and-comer Dan Rather.
