Last night’s presidential debate was awful.
There isn’t much decency left in public discourse, and the only glimpse in that debate came from a struggling Biden. The moderators were wooden automatons, and despite their rules, Trump raved on, ignoring every question and subverting the process, a complete caricature of even his 2016 self. At several points I wondered if he had been replaced with a orange-slathered robot. At this point, there is no real difference. Did it ever matter to Trump voters?
The press have already surrounded Biden like vultures. And, yeah, he’s old. He looks old. He acts old. His stutter was present in force.
But he also answered all the questions. And when he misspoke, he corrected himself. Trump didn’t bother with either. He was only there to strut his tail-feathers.
And yet the call is for Biden to step down. Sure, he should listen to them… when those same voices tell Trump to do the same just as loudly.
The best lesson here is not that Biden should walk away, but that both candidates should. The entire country deserves better.
But if what little is left of the GOP can blindly accept Trump’s empty bluster as statesmanship, then the skittish Democrats can accept Biden’s hesitant but solid counsel. I heard a guy who backs NATO and Ukraine to the hilt, who wants Roe back, who wants to raise taxes on the rich and reduce health care costs.
Any electable Democrat will take exactly those same positions. Whether they are delivered by a 42-year-old or a 82-year-old makes no difference to me. He has a much younger VP if he falters.
And alas, the easiest way to tell who your friends are is to watch what happens when you falter.
As the debate concluded, I found himself thinking about the 1992 vice-presidential debate. I watched it live on television, as that was the only option – Quayle-Gore-Stockdale, also in Georgia.
Stockdale, Perot’s pick for VP, was relatively unknown to the audience. He may have been the most impressive VP candidate of the last hundred years: Medal of Honor recipient, Stoic scholar, a moral rock. I think about his f-you letter after resigning as president of The Citadel often, as it’s almost impossible to conceive of a college president acting solely out of principle in 2024.
He chose to begin with rhetorical questions – who am I, why am I here – which were initially well received, but his overall elderly manner and hearing aid clashed with the much younger Gore and Quayle. To their credit, they paid him deference. It was a different era.
And yet, it was exactly the same. The press turned those first rhetorical questions into a soundbite – and so that he didn’t know who he was (“Who am I?”) became the news.
Strangely enough, the foundation of Trump’s 2016 run lies in Perot’s 1992 political outsider “I’m a businessman” pitch. Perot/Stockdale went on to win 18.9% percent of the popular vote, the strongest finish of any third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose run. Then again, that was much lower than where Perot had polled in the spring; Perot sank his campaign with increasingly weird behavior in July, which I suspect would have emerged later if not sooner. But it set a precedent.
So I’ll remind that this is still June. Potential July implosions have yet to spring forth. There’s still a lot that can happen before November.