What are the right words to describe the first presidential debate of 2020?
Should we call what we saw a slugfest? A dogfight? Verbal mud wrestling by two old white guys?
Or maybe what we saw was mutually assured destruction.
However one chooses to describe it, almost everyone agrees it was ugly. And maybe mutually assured destruction is the best description because this was like a nasty brawl by a married couple on their way to divorce. There was an abundance of yelling, talking over and past each other, lots of bitterness, buckets of contempt.
And, just like one of those nasty couples’ spats, no one learned anything and no one can remember what it was really about.
We just wish we hadn’t seen it. We feel diminished by it. For we are diminished by it.
The presidential campaign, and the democratic process itself, is diminished by a debate like this.
President Donald Trump is a sort of WWE presidential candidate: He creates an over-the-top persona that plays to a particular audience, and he body-slams his opponent.
He is also, it seems, genuinely angry. He feels that he can’t get a break from the press. Nothing he does brings him any credit. Not Middle Eastern peace initiatives, a booming economy (before COVID-19) or solid judicial nominees. He’s not wrong.
But the anger and the yelling will not win him many voters beyond his base. Both candidates talk almost exclusively to their base constituencies.
Joe Biden at least did not look as fragile and confused Tuesday night as he sometimes has in recent months. And he was able, at times, to convey decency and reasonableness. But it is almost impossible to tell what he really believes or what he wants to accomplish as president. His only really big and consistent message is: I am not Donald Trump, who is supposed to be self-evidently stupid and evil.
It’s not much of a message. It certainly does not lift up.
Biden is hemmed in by his party and its undefinable slogans. “Social justice” hovers like a chimera over the party. “Systemic racism” is the monster ever hiding in the closet or under the bed. Why not use words that have power because their meaning is known — like due process or equal protection? Why not run on a promise or a program that is concrete — like an infrastructure jobs program; a new WPA, instead of Trump loathing?
Mr. Biden knows that most of his party has gone off the deep end. He knows that burning down police stations or defunding police forces is not liberalism and has said so. But quietly. He must be very careful with the people who constitute his base — the woke, wannabe woke and woke fellow travelers. Would he dare to stand up to these folk if he were in the White House? He is stuck.
And Trump is stuck, too — with himself. He is stuck with his chaotic and ad hoc style of governing, his bottomless anger and his profound aloneness, both as a leader and as a man. He can’t figure out how to build, even on his own record, or how to be president of the whole nation.
What we saw Tuesday night was ugly, not just because it was childish and rude behavior by two grown men who aspire to lead us, but because it betrayed their mutual inability to understand what we the people need from them at this moment in our history.
— Tribune News Service
