Election Countdown, 130 Days to Go: A Bad Night for America.
Let me count the ways.
Deb and I watched every minute of the dreadful “debate” tonight on CNN. I grabbed the remote to turn off the TV the instant the pundit-panels kicked in. A man can take only so much.
So what follows is my own “certified organic” reaction to what I just saw. It may or may not match the prevailing reaction tone—I haven’t seen or listened to any of it. That’s for the morning. Apologies in advance for inevitable late-night typos.
1) The overview: A disastrous start.
Thirty minutes in I tweeted out this summary:
Things shifted—in Biden’s favor, and against Trump—as the night went on. But I can’t imagine that many people stuck it out as long as I felt obliged to. And what made the opening-minutes performance so striking is the “range” point I mention in the tweet, which is a version of the famed “expectations game.”
—Biden’s range. Everyone know that Joe Biden is old. And everyone has seen the way his carriage, his gait, his facial expressions have become stiffer and more labored during his time in office.
But anyone who has watched Biden in office has seen him time and again “exceed expectations”—seeming to shake off the years and come on strongest when the stakes were highest. The best-known recent example was this year’s State of the Union address. In the days before, Fox and the GOP were presenting him as comatose. On the day after, they were saying that he’d shouted too much and must have been on pep pills — what else could have made him come across so forcefully?
The State of the Union wasn’t the only example. Biden also did very well with his big D-Day address just this month, with his commencement speech at Morehouse before that, and in most other recent performances. His trademark had become “beating the spread,” rallying when it counted most.
That is what I was expecting tonight. The Trump forces must also have been expecting it, given their revival this week of the “pep-pills” line to pre-discount a strong Biden performance.
So that is why his halting, raspy, fact-clogged, uneasy-sounding first set of answers was so startling. Without consciously realizing it, I had gotten used to the idea that in a crunch he could sound younger than he looks. This time he sounded (and looked) very old. That’s what I meant by the bottom of his range.
—The range for Trump. Everyone knows that Trump rambles and rants and makes things up as he plays to the crowd. And in its sentence-by-sentence content, what he said this evening was as outrageous a slurry of insults, nonsense, narcissism, and lies as any of his standard rally speeches. I can type fast, but I literally could not record the lies as quickly as he uttered them. Daniel Dale and others at CNN tried to keep up in an online tally here.
But sentence by sentence, the Trump of these opening minutes sounded more polite, less ranting, more concise, and generally more “normal” than the man who spins his stories about sharks or shouts that everything is rigged. That’s what I meant about the high end of his range. In one of the debate chronicles I wrote back in the pre-Trump era, I noted that sometimes you can judge a debate’s effect by watching it with the sound turned off, and just noticing the expressions and body language. In tonight’s case, if you listened “with the words turned off” — ignoring content and just listening to tone of voice — you’d hear Trump sounding much more confident and forceful, and, bizarrely, calmer, than Biden did.
—And for CNN. The moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, are both fully capable of very tough follow-up questioning. They did almost zero of that tonight, presumably because of whatever pact CNN had to sign to make the debate happen.
As a result, Trump could reel off one preposterous, defamatory, easily disprovable lie after another—for instance, that Biden is a “Manchurian Candidate” paid by the Chinese government, or Trump’s repeated claim that Democratic governors favored making it legal to kill babies “even after birth”—and Bash or Tapper would respond with, “Thank you. And now to you, President Biden…”
Even at his best, Biden wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the torrent of lies. No one could: You can get out a lie in one sentence, but it will take three or four to explain the truth. (For instance: Trump’s claim that Biden was going to “wipe out” Social Security and Medicare by putting “millions and millions” of illegal immigrants on the rolls. In fact, immigrants improve the finances of those programs, because they are on average young. But, as you see, it takes more words to lay that out.) And Biden was far from at his best.
The net effect: Trump started out the debate lying but sounding controlled; Biden started out fact-burdened and sounding unsteady; and CNN became the sluice for this toxic lie-dense fare.
2) The two oddest lines.
Number one, from Joe Biden: “You have the morals of an alley cat.” Sounds like it was from a 1930s movie, but came across as authentically Bidenesque.
It would have been even more movie-esque if that line had ended with “Donald.” But Biden never addressed him that way. Trump, by contrast, several times called him not “Mr. President” or “President Biden” but “Joe.”
Number two, from Donald Trump: right after the alley-cat line, “I didn’t have sex with a porn star.”
Hoooh boy. Apart from everything else—ie, that absolutely no one believes his claim—this is the weird punctiliousness that caused Trump such trouble in the Stormy Daniels trial. (You remember how this worked: If Trump hadn’t insisted on denying the encounter, then the prosecution couldn’t have called Daniels as a witness, and then ….) Among the many mysteries of Trump are the points of vanity or pride he simply won’t let go. Which leads us to…
3) The most preposterous exchange.
Perhaps no one dares tell Trump that he looks ridiculous when he brags about “acing” a screening test for incipient dementia. Because he won’t stop talking about it. Even in a debate like this. From the CNN transcript:
I took two tests, cognitive tests. I aced them, both of them, as you know. We made it public. He [Biden] took none. I’d like to see him take one, just one, a real easy one. Like go through the first five questions, he couldn’t do it. But I took two cognitive tests…
I’m in very good health. I just won two club championships, not even senior, the regular club championships! To do that, you have to be quite smart and you have to be able to hit the ball a long way.
And this is the person who started out the debate sounding more “normal.” Giant meteor, please strike us now.
4) A lie that won’t go away.
On the Atlantic’s site before the debate, Jeffrey Goldberg had a post about a revelation that apparently gnaws at Trump more deeply than the nuttiness about cognitive-test scores. It was Goldberg’s report, now backed up by multiple sources, that Trump had referred to American soldiers in World War I military cemeteries as “suckers” and “losers.”
Biden introduced the quote, and Trump blew up:
First of all, that was a made-up quote, “suckers and losers.” They made it up. It was in a third-rate magazine that’s failing, like many of these magazines. He made that up…. I’m so glad this came up, and he brought it up. There’s nobody that’s taken better care of our soldiers than I have.
To think that I would, in front of generals and others, say suckers and losers – we have 19 people that said it was never said by me. It was made up by him, just like “Russia, Russia, Russia was made up.”…
He [apparently Biden] made up the suckers and losers, so he should apologize to me right now.
We have not heard the last of this story.
5) As the evening wore on.
Joe Biden was notably stronger in the final 30 minutes of the debate. And Trump became notably nastier, more sweeping in his claims, more direct in his insults. Gesturing toward Biden, he said “Our veterans and our soldiers can’t stand this guy.” This guy being the Commander in Chief. “They can’t stand him. They think he’s the worst ‘commander in chief,’ if that’s what you call him, that we’ve ever had. They can’t stand him.”
And
He is the worst president in the history of our country. He’s destroyed our country…
He wants open borders. He wants our country to either be destroyed or he wants to pick up those people as voters. We just can’t let it happen. If he wins this election, our country doesn’t have a chance. Not even a chance of coming out of this rut. We probably won’t have a country left anymore. That’s how bad it is. He is the worst in history by far.
This was Trump back down in his familiar range. Was anyone still watching or listening at that point? Would it give anyone who is “Trump-curious” second thoughts? Who knows.
6) The worst omen for the planet from the evening.
Dana Bash asked Trump what he would do about climate. He answered on an entirely unrelated topic. She came back:
BASH: 38 seconds left, President Trump. Will you take any action as President to slow the climate crisis?
TRUMP: So, I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air, and we had it… We had the best numbers ever. We were using all forms of energy, all forms, everything. And yet, during my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever.
That was essentially it.
7) The most un-American parts of the evening.
It’s a contest of two. One was Trump’s insistence, especially toward the end of the debate, that the US had become what he used to call a shithole country. For instance:
For three-and-a-half years, we’re living in hell…
The whole country is exploding because of you [Biden], because they don’t respect you. And they have to respect their president and they don’t respect you throughout the world.
We’re in a failing nation, but it’s not going to be failing anymore. We’re going to make it great again.
Candidates challenging an incumbent always say the country has problems. “We’re living in hell” is a further twist.
But the more significantly anti-American note from Trump was his flat-out refusal, under follow-up questioning from Dana Bash, to say that he would accept the results of an election. (By the way, neither moderator asked Trump, “Who won the 2020 election?” Perhaps that was part of an agreement as well.)
The follow-up exchange, after Trump had avoided answering the first time:
BASH: President Trump, the question was, will you accept the results of the election regardless of who wins? Yes or no, please?
TRUMP: If it’s a fair and legal and good election – absolutely.
If. That is the same qualifier he always uses. This exchange should get as much coverage from this “debate” as Biden’s hoarseness and hesitation.
8) What happens now?
I hope someone has a clearer idea on this front than I do.
For now, good night, after a bad night.
I had no interest whatsoever in polluting my brain with last night's side show. To what end would I endure any of that? Instead, I enjoyed a pleasant hour with Father Brown and his crew.
The day after Barack Obama first appeared on the US stage with his dynamic speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, I asked a good friend, whom I knew to be a solid Democrat, if he had heard the speech. He smiled and said, "I have to be careful about listening to politicians - pretty soon I want to start believing 'em." I still remember that expression; it helps me to keep a rational amount of skepticism in place when confronted by the endless promises, assurances and compromises of those who seek our votes.
But all that nuance is lost in this year's contest. This may not be Jesus vs. Beelzebub, but it's not far off.
NY Times writers were merciless in their assessment of the president's performance last night, saying top Dems were scrambling to find an alternative candidate. Frank Bruni, thankfully, offered a calming counterpoint. I was left bewildered - is there no one left in this nation who is willing to speak the simple truth about "the king" prancing about in his underwear?
Good God, America - look at the records of each man. Look, if you are able, beyond the bluster and window dressing to the substance. Do you really believe that character is no longer of consequence? Are you ready to simply capitulate to the lies because they are presented with such frequency and intensity? Do you genuinely prefer a psychotic dictator over an elder statesman because the psycho lies with more panache than the statesman expressing the facts?
Have you no sense of decency, America? At long last, have you no sense of decency?
I posted this at That's Another Fine Mess about the night:
Once again, the Cretin News Network and the overage yuppies still stupid enough to continue to work there lived down to my expectations: no mic control, no holding El Jefe Del Mar A Lardo to the rules, and Alex Wagner proved how desperate she is not to get dropped at MSNBC like happened back in 2008 (I just canceled recording her show). I’ll laugh if he wins and they and the rest of the DC Press Corpse find themselves looking out from the wrong side of the barbed wire fence at the tent city in West Texas they’re confined to. They all fucking well deserve it, but we don’t.
Once again, I will say that if the DC Press Corpse and the rest of the cable news yuppies and the “Democratic Consultants” had been in the Navy between December 7, 1941 and June 4, 1942, someone would have thrown their useless asses overboard.
Oh, it’s terible! The enemy is winning! Whatever can we do??? Well, as Dick Best told me, “We did our jobs and didn’t think about losing because it was unthinkable.” And then on June 4, 1942, they cut out the heart of the Japanese fleet in six deadly minutes.
Too many Americans act like professional-level nitwits. They’re the reason we didn’t get The GI Bill For Everybody in the Second New Deal that didn’t happen because they were (sniff, sniff, boo hoo) “disappointed” by the way the war had been going, so they didn’t show up to vote on the first Tuesday in November 1942…
Four days before the US Army landed in North Africa. Step One on the hard-fought road to Normandy.
And let me tell you from ten years’ experience as a “professional Democrat” that the term “Democratic Consultant” is a two word quickie for “over-educated otherwise-unemployable moron who’s a legend in his own mind”.
I agree completely with what Josh Marshall wrote to a TPM subscriber:
“It sucked. It was brutal. But this is where we are. And a million people in history have been in suck and brutal situations and they pushed forward. Maybe they were in a battle and then they all died. Or maybe that was the moment when they made the critical decision to pull together and they won. This is living in history where we don’t know which story we’re in. That’s life. It provides an immense psychic relief to break the existential glass and say he should withdraw. Okay, then what? This is where we are and we have to keep fighting because that’s the only realistic choice we have.”
We. Have. To. Keep. Fighting. Because. That’s. The. Only. Realistic. Choice. We. Have.