If things go as they appear to be, Thursday night’s events could go down as the biggest unforced error in presidential electoral politics since Richard Nixontired and unshaven, he went on camera against John F. Kennedy in 1960.
Joe Biden faced two sets of limitations in the CNN-organized debate on June 27. One of them was the format in which his campaign, as trump‘s, agreed: CNN’s commitment Jake Tapper It is Dana Bash simply asking questions and allowing the candidates rather than the moderators themselves to do the fact-checking put him at a disadvantage before the event began. It takes a great debater to resist Trump’s particular shamelessness in saying anything. And this brings us to the second set of limitations: if Biden was ever a great debater, he will not be so in 2024.
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The questions Tapper and Bash asked were rudimentary and thought-provoking on a variety of news topics. (If the stakes weren’t so high, I’d say they were reminded of Mike Myers’ “Saturday Night Live” character, Linda Richman, pitching an idea and then saying, “Talk among yourselves.”) Tapper and Bash’s questions were inelegant, inelegant, I didn’t intend to extract anything more than conflict. But then, the mere conflict was the point. We are not in the era when the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates organized events that were, while televised, structured without the interests of any network in mind, built for revelations but not fireworks. This was a debate about and by CNN – the network that, in recent years, has distinguished itself with endless talk panels in which speakers talk over each other, ungoverned by any guiding vision other than to maintain a lively, freewheeling conversation. structure.
Near the end of the debate, Bash asked Trump to answer the question of whether he would accept the results of the 2024 election, even as he dodged them. But even though she asked a yes or no question, she accepted his answer that she would accept it if it was, by her standards, fair—which could mean anything. But, in the last moment of this debate, this question was asked, it seemed that Trump’s answer didn’t matter much: based on this debate, Trump would, of course, accept the results of the elections, because he is winning, and will win.
It’s worth reiterating: Bash and Tapper’s moderation presented Biden with a challenge: Debating Trump, a slippery proposition in the best of times, came this time with the obligation to check his distortions in real time, which Tapper and Bash weren’t going to do . But a President faces challenges – including having to do the work of addressing untruths without the help of journalists – and Biden was not up to this.
Part of this was bad luck, or poorly structured preparation and poorly structured rest: the image of Biden as having aged out of work was not helped by his painfully hoarse voice (a temporary condition, it turns out) and his strange, open, divisive expression. . screen while Trump spoke (one to which the public had not been consistently exposed). Biden appeared not only tired but also inexperienced: He chose to bring up his decision to quickly withdraw military forces from Afghanistan, one of the most unpopular decisions of his administration, and strangely botched a description of what he sees as the “three quarters ” that support Roe v. .Wade – wasting an opportunity to elucidate what is currently one of the Democratic Party’s strongest issues.
This represents, or should represent, a worrying moment for Democrats – the incumbent President who has refused to step down is clearly ruining a winnable election. His mistakes are his clumsy distortions and his inability to control his open mouth on camera and his willingness to stoop to Trump’s level (at the end of the debate, mocking Trump’s weight), a strategy that never worked. His campaign’s mistakes include joining this debate. Both sides seemed to have learned a lesson after the catastrophic first debate of 2020, in which Trump shouted at Biden at every turn and Biden was unable to control his train of thought or his temper; both sides seemed uninterested in reenacting such a scene, until, suddenly, they did.
And Trump learned from his past mistakes: although always, irreducibly himself, he strictly adhered to time limits (with a couch potato’s understanding, perhaps, that with the microphone cut off when his time was up, he would look like a fool shouting silently) and kept his tenor something less than shrill. Whatever lessons Biden has learned since 2020 have been overcome over time. And insofar as the CNN debate was a spectacle, it was a “King Lear”-like tragedy: the story of a man unable to accept that his moment has passed.
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