A Debate Drawing Cringes
Terry H. Schwadron
June 28, 2024
Over the next days, various polls will ask whether the televised presidential debate between two old, white men moved any voter choices. But even as the debate aired, perhaps the more ominous news is coming from behind-the-scenes maneuvers to manipulate the vote counting that will decide the election.
With the margins close five months before the elections — and even before either Joe Biden or Donald Trump has been formally nominated — the debate may have seen on all sides as a tool to try to turn a moribund race into yet more of an ideological contest, to move it beyond a dead heat based largely on whom we don’t like into a choice about our national direction.
In that regard, any viewer would have to see the debate as a meandering collection of shaky vagueness and nasty personal comments, with all attention on performative perceptions, not on how to govern the nation. Trump saw Biden as a hapless, aging, criminal who is “like a Palestinian”; Biden saw Trump, a convicted felon, as a “loser” with the morals of “an alley cat.”
With political divides being as deep as they are, it is unlikely that any heads were turned, even with so many viewers directed toward any number of verbal gaffes, misleading statements unresponsive to questions, or outright lies. Biden ‘s voice grew stronger after an uncertain start, and Trump’s bullying just worsened. As a debate, it made us cringe.
“More than 70 percent of American voters plan to tune in to Thursday night’s debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, and many of them will spend the night raging against the TV,” bemoaned Politico.com. “This year’s contest features the highest share of adults in at least three decades expressing negative views of both candidates, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.”
It is doubtful that a lot of Americans stayed with an extraordinarily dull night that wandered from topic to topic. Whatever the debate thought it might achieve in allowing two divergent candidates to present competing visions, the messages were lost amid unfounded charges about immigrations and inflation — and in the unfounded hope that the candidates would answer q question that was asked.
To a certain extent, the public effort all year has been to “normalize” an election contest that is anything but normal, since Trump wants to change the entire role of government to reflect a one-man rule.
The Maneuvering
Even as the two candidates sought to impress with pre-learned lines and slogans, with sly word attacks one another, what kept ringing in the background was the backstage pursuit of plans to change the rules to seek a guaranteed win in November.
There were plenty of references during the debate to saving democracy itself, though the concept had diametrically opposed meanings for Trump and Biden. Even as the characterizations of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot organized by Trump to undercut the last election’s results and remain in office were being debated, there are efforts underway now to use legal systems for vote-counting should Biden appear to win.
Mostly under the radar, The Washington Post editorialized just yesterday, “Trump backers in key states are probing for weaknesses in the nation’s decentralized election administration system. For example, Trump’s allies appear to be exploring whether county-level officials can block the certification of vote tallies, if the election doesn’t go their way.” With more than 3,000 counties, delaying certification in a few could force a cascading problem fouling the official Electoral College vote and pushing a tight election to the House, where rules would heavily dictate a Republican victory.
The Post outlined that Trump vote-blocking effort is underway in multiple states, with Trump himself refusing in advance whatever the vote in November brings. This effort marries with Republican National Committee work to draft a 100,000 member MAGA army of poll monitors, plans for election challenges, and work in the House to guarantee a less-violent interference in Electoral College counts.
The Trump insistence that Democrats, voting machine companies, the news media, courts all conspired in 2020 to deny him election has not disappeared; it has merely morphed into efforts to spread doubt about the election and tosearch for any hole in the system to exploit.
Expectations Too High?
With so much hype, the debate itself was bound to disappoint.
We knew that Biden is prepared, that Trump would be quick to anger, that there are major differences about a generally optimistic or pessimistic view of the world. We knew that Biden leans on institutions and traditions that Trump would dump in a minute, whether involving allies and overseas promises or about the value of an activist federal government altogether.
For Biden, “democracy” is about accepting voter choices; for Trump, “democracy” is about his perception of using the Justice Department to pursue criminal and civil cases against him individually. A Washington Post/Schar School of self-identified swing “decider” voters in six battleground states last week reported that 38 percent said Trump would do a better job of handling threats of democracy to the U.S., while 29 percent said Biden and 23 percent said neither — not a vote of confidence for either. One wonders what the voters perceived the question to mean, since Trump is actively working against most definitions of democracy.
For Biden, power is about policy; for Trump, national policy is about his own power, putting him in a position individually to dictate all sorts of outcomes.
For each, Supreme Court justice and judicial nominations are extremely important as a sign of whether we are a rights-expanding nation or one that will increasingly limit choices in the full array of issues that arise as culture war issues. This conservative Supreme Court majority is about to rule on whether either candidate can ever be held to account for breaking the law.
On taxes, trade, health policies, business regulation, foreign relations, and immigration, it is clear there are major differences between the two, yet the proposals from each sound often less than persuasive. From Biden, there always seems a desire for legislative compromise; for Trump, there always seems an easy answer to complex questions that involve someone else having to acknowledge defeat
Somehow, this election seems a choice between repeated images of a doddering old man — who somehow can direct teams facing two wars, a gridlocked Congress and perceptions that our economy is never good enough — and an egoistic, persistent liar and convicted felon who also is an old man who often sails aimlessly into verbal space with no real agenda besides undercutting our trust in institutions.
Perhaps the most significant thing about the debate was that it had required muting microphones to enforce exchanges between candidates resembling coherence.
Maybe we need attention on something other than two-minute back and forth. But then that would require we pay attention to the public welfare rather than whose stumbling ramble to posed questions was worse.
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