The Debates
The debates were a mess. The Vice-Presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence was more civil than the presidential debates, but they were still tough to watch. The stars of the Vice-Presidential debate turned out to be the housefly on Pence’s head and Harris’s withering smile at all of Pence’s interruptions. The presidential debate had no star, and with all its interruptions and name-calling, it turned out to be embarrassing. Beyond all this, both debates were filled with lies and distortions, mostly from the Republican candidates.
The most obvious thing about the vice-presidential debate is that a debate actually took place. There were statements, rebuttals, and a moderator mostly keeping things under control. Even so, Pence had a tendency to interrupt Harris and take away some of her speaking time. Harris was clearly playing it safe (her side has a large lead in the polls), and Pence seemed to have trouble making any sort of positive argument about the Trump administration’s record. Even the fact that the two candidates were separated by plexiglass made it pretty clear that Pence, the head of the White House’s Covid-19 taskforce, had done a poor job. And then a fly landed on Pence’s head and wouldn’t leave for two full minutes. It was distracting, but it was also entertaining. That fly now has over 100 Twitter accounts in its name. When this is the high point of a debate, you know things are going poorly.
Where to begin with the presidential debate? CNN’s Jake Tapper referred to it as a “hot mess in a dumpster fire in a trainwreck,” and he probably didn’t go far enough. It was bad. Biden had to fight just to get a word in, and Trump persistently broke the rules of the debate. At one point, Biden asked Trump, “Will you shut up, Man?” To be clear, this is a former Vice-President speaking to a sitting President in the context of an election campaign. It’s really sad. There was supposed to be a second debate, but then Trump caught Covid-19 and refused to participate in a virtual debate with Biden. This move backfired, because Trump accepted a town hall format and spent over twenty minutes being grilled by Savannah Guthrie. One particularly troubling exchange involved Trump’s retweet of a debunked conspiracy theory about Biden ordering Navy Seals to be murdered to cover up the faked death of Osama Bin Laden. Whe Guthrie pushed Trump, he said, “That was a retweet, that was an opinion of somebody, and that was a retweet. I'll put it out there, people can decide for themselves, I don't take a position.” "I don't get that," Guthrie responded. "You're the president — you're not like someone's crazy uncle who can just retweet whatever!" At the Biden town hall, things were more calm, as Biden laid out his plans for the next four years. He fudged some answers and dodged others, but it was pretty ordinary. Complaining about the tone of the Biden event, Trump adviser Mercedes Schlapp wrote,“Well @JoeBiden @ABCPolitics townhall feels like I am watching an episode of Mister Rodgers [sic] Neighborhood.” The point here is that Schlapp felt that Biden was getting easy treatment while Trump was getting grilled. This might be true, but then Biden isn’t responsible for 218,000 American deaths from Covid-19, the worst economic collapse since 1929, and a steep rise in racial violence.
It’s reasonable to argue that presidential debates are not really that important. I agree with this, but I also think it’s good to have candidates present their ideas with people there to fire back at them. This year’s debates were something else, however, and I’m not sure that we’ll ever have presidential debates again in the future. You can add this to the long list of public things that Trump has broken.
