So we had what was supposed to be the third presidential debate and was actually the second because Viceroy Trump got himself coronavirus and wouldn’t agree to a virtual debate. This time, both he and challenger Joe Biden were tested on debate night and found negative, so the Commission on Presidential Debates decided to take down the plexiglass barriers that they were going to install between the two men’s podiums.
They were also supposed to mute the inactive candidate’s microphone during the active candidate’s question time, but I still heard these guys talking over each other. And while Trump didn’t “work the ref” with Kristen Welker nearly as much as he did with Chris Wallace (or Lesley Stahl) he still insisted on having his turn even when it wasn’t his turn. But I guess his handlers got the message through to him that not letting anybody else talk at all wasn’t going to work in appealing to the public. So Trump was ONLY as stupid and belligerent as he was in the debates with Hillary Clinton, and it’s doubtful that will work any better for him than it did last time. After all, even Trump fans don’t think it was the debates that won 2016.
The problem is that for all the Trumpublicans’ attempts to make Biden look sleepy, senile and corrupt, when Biden actually gets to talk (as he did tonight) he actually comes off as fairly together and professional, which is only a problem if you, like the Trump fan club, consider being together and professional as a trait of some Deep State disguised lizard person. Trump once again tried to pin Hunter Biden’s scandals on Joe, and he pointed out that the only guy who got in legal trouble over Burisma was Trump when his ethical violations toward Ukraine ended up getting him impeached.
They had a certain amount of time to discuss renewable energy versus environmental initiatives, and Trump said that contrary to opinion, he wanted “the cleanest air… the most crystal clear water..” – all these superlatives without a policy behind them. Apparently no one ever told him that running the White House isn’t like running a used car lot. Biden said (not entirely fairly) that Trump said windmills cause cancer. Trump in his best Biff Tanner mode said, “I know more about wind than you do.” (He’s certainly a lot better at producing it.) And when Biden admitted he wanted a conversion to renewables by 2025, Trump taunted that this would kill the oil industry. And he said, “will you remember that, Texas? Will you remember that, Pennsylvania?” As he himself would say, he wouldn’t have to beg Texas and Pennsylvania for votes if he wasn’t losing.
It’s certainly not impossible to critique the Democrats or counter their arguments, it just looks that way when Donald Trump is your intellectual champion. He had maybe two good points to make against Biden or for himself, and both are, and were, easily countered. One, the coronavirus is in fact making a comeback in a lot of the places where it seemed to be under control. Biden pointed out that the current outbreak in Europe is from a much smaller base of cases than here, precisely because we let the virus get out of control. Secondly, there were a few different points at which the debate went to prison sentencing and other areas where the Trump Organization has made a few token gestures, and Trump kept goading Biden, saying, “you had eight years, why didn’t you do anything about these problems you’re talking about when you had a chance?” First, Biden did respond, but almost in passing, that a lot of his time in the Obama Administration was with a Republican Congress. Secondly, it’s quite true (as a lot of black ‘progressives’ will point out) that the Democrats really didn’t care about sentencing reform, or police brutality, or civil rights issues, and did take non-white constituencies for granted. But that gets to the real issue that I’m not sure Biden is think-outside-the-box enough to get to and was too diplomatic to raise even if he did: Up to this point, Democrats assumed that Republicans were peers whom they disagreed with, and not an enemy who would never negotiate in good faith. During most of the pre-Trump period under Obama, Democrats (and Obama himself) acted as though negotiation was still possible, even when no Republican would vote for the Affordable Care Act and Mitch McConnell said after getting the Senate majority that his goal was to make Obama a one-term president. Even then, you could still assume that was just partisan conservatism, as opposed to obviously being a reactionary, counter-majoritarian policy to disregard the entire rest of the country (even white people) and run things the way the apartheid regime did in South Africa. Thanks to Trump saying the quiet part loud (really loud, and repeatedly), it’s a bit harder for Democrats to deny where they really are, and there’s no reason for them not to play hardball in response.
Otherwise, Biden did what he had to do: He kept pointing out that for all of Trump’s bragging, the country is in the ditch right now, precisely because of his policies. We can’t “learn to live with” coronavirus, as Trump says, because it means more people are going to die needlessly. We can’t get our economy back until we reverse the spread of the disease. And while Trump mocked at Biden’s “kitchen table issues” talk, mocking was all he could do, because he doesn’t have a plan, and everyone knows it.
But since everyone’s minds are made up, the best Biden could do was not screw up, and the best Trump could do was not make things worse for himself. He probably accomplished that. Is it enough to turn the trend away from losing Texas, Pennsylvania, and the other states he needs? As the man would say, “We’ll see what happens.”