Biden should never have debated Trump — and CNN did him no favors

If things go as they seem to be going, Thursday night’s events could go down in history as the biggest unforced error in presidential election politics since Richard Nixon, tired and unshaven, appeared on camera against John F. Kennedy in 1960.

Joe Biden faced two sets of restrictions during the June 27 CNN-hosted debate. One was the format — which his campaign, like Trump’s, had agreed to: the commitment by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash to simply ask questions and let the candidates, rather than the moderators themselves, get the facts check. , put him on his back foot before the event started. It takes a great debater to resist Trump’s particular shamelessness in saying anything. And this brings us to the second set of limitations: If Biden was ever a great debater, he isn’t one in 2024.

The questions Tapper and Bash asked were rudimentary and thought-provoking about various topics in the news. (If the stakes weren’t so high, I’d say they were remembering the Mike Myers character from Saturday Night Live, Linda Richman, who pitched an idea and then said, “Talk to each other.”) The questions from Tapper and Bash were formless, inelegant, not intended to highlight anything more than conflict. But then sheer conflict was the point. We are not in the era when the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates organized events that, while televised, were structured without the interests of any particular network in mind, focused on revelations but not fireworks. This was a debate about and from CNN – the network that has distinguished itself in recent years with endless panel discussions in which talking heads talk past each other, without any guiding insight beyond keeping a spirited, structureless conversation going.

Near the end of the debate, Bash pinned Trump down to answer the question of whether he would accept the outcome of the 2024 election, even as he dodged it. But even though she asked it as a yes-or-no question, she accepted his answer that he would accept it if, by his standards, it was fair – which could mean anything. But late in this debate this question was asked and it seemed as if Trump’s answer hardly mattered anymore: based on this debate, Trump would obviously accept the outcome of the election because he is winning. to win.

It’s worth repeating: Bash and Tapper’s moderation presented Biden with a challenge: debating Trump, a slippery proposition at the best of times, this time involved the obligation to check his inaccuracies in real time, which Tapper and Bash wouldn’t. But a president faces challenges — including having to tackle falsehoods without the help of journalists — and Biden has not responded.

Some of it was bad luck, or poorly structured preparation and poorly structured rest: Biden’s image as having aged out of his job was not helped by his painfully hoarse voice (a temporary condition, it seems) and his strange, gaping expression. screen as Trump spoke (one to which the viewing audience had not been consistently exposed). Biden seemed not only tired but also untrained: He chose to bring up his decision to quickly withdraw military forces from Afghanistan, one of the most strikingly unpopular decisions of his administration, and strangely provided a description of what he considers as the “three trimesters” underlying Roe v. Wade – an opportunity squandered to clarify what is currently one of the Democratic Party’s strongest issues.

This represents, or should represent, a sobering moment for Democrats: the incumbent president who refused to step aside is clearly botching a winnable election. His faults are his clumsy inaccuracies and his inability to control his gaping stare in front of the camera, and his willingness to stoop to Trump’s level (late in the debate where he mocks Trump’s weight), a strategy which has not worked once. His campaign’s mistakes include joining this debate. Both sides seemed to have learned a lesson after the catastrophic first debate of 2020, in which Trump shouted Biden down at every turn and Biden couldn’t control his train of thought or his mood; neither side seemed interested in reenacting such a scene, until suddenly they were.

And Trump has learned from his past mistakes: while he always, irreducibly, kept himself pretty strict on time limits (with a TV junkie’s insight perhaps that if his microphone went out when the time was up, he would look like a fool who shouted in silence) and kept his tenor slightly less than shrill. Whatever lessons Biden has learned since 2020 have been made obsolete by the passage of time. And since the CNN debate was a spectacle, it was a “King Lear”-like tragedy: the story of a man who couldn’t accept that his moment had passed.