On a debate stage, the candidate who “falls in the orchestra pit” will get more coverage than a candidate who talks about foreign policy.  – Roger Ailes

So to today’s Trump-Biden debate and my two reasons for not watching it. The last one I paid any attention to was Clinton vs. Bush in 1992, although I’ve re-watched parts of those and others from earlier and later times. Yet even then I struggle to recall much from any of them, and that’s a key point of my first reason for ignoring it: the background to today’s event.

These televised debates between Presidential contenders are just not that important anymore compared to the advertising, interviews and the overall machinery that a modern election campaign uses to get out the votes. As an aside I’d prefer interviews of candidates where they could be grilled one at a time by one or more people – and those people to include more than just journalists.

In fact there are arguments as to whether such debates ever were that important, starting with the first one between Nixon and Kennedy in 1960. Back in 2017, a professor of communication (and a journalist with 20 years experience) dealt with some of the myths from that debate, starting with this one: Viewer-listener disagreement is a myth of JFK-Nixon debate. And he’s produced another analysis just now, from a slightly different angle:

So what altered the consensus about the first debate from being a draw to being Nixon’s on-air ruin? The answer no doubt rests in the search for a post-election explanation for Kennedy’s victory. He won the popular vote by 0.2 percentage points, or about 118,000 votes.
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Whether television was so revealing and conclusive is arguable. Less debatable, however, is the sense today that television had made a difference. As historian David Greenberg has written about that first televised debate, “the perception of television’s influence went on to transform American politics, shaping the behavior of leaders and candidates for decades.”

To that observation one could easily add: The perception of television’s influence likewise transformed conventional wisdom about the first-ever presidential debate.

And that’s from an age when such debates were substantive and there was no talk about “soundbites” and such.

Although there were no TV debates in the 1964, ’68 and ’72 elections, they returned in 1976 for Carter v Ford and have become a staple of such elections ever since, and probably up to the 1992 Clinton-Bush ones it could be argued that they were still serious affairs.

But that began to change after Reagan-Mondale in 1984 and the reason had less to do with nefarious operatives training their candidates than the simple fact that slowly dawned on candidates and their staff: that people remembered very little of the debates, even a short-time afterward, and what they did remember was perhaps one moment. Some examples:

1976 – Ford flubs an answer, saying that Poland is not dominated by the USSR.
1980 – “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” (concluding remarks)
1984 – Reagan burying the age questions with his humorous aside that he wouldn’t take shots at Mondales youth and inexperience. Even Mondale laughed.
1992 – Bush 41 looking at his watch as Bill Clinton droned on.

That moment from Reagan in 1984 was undoubtedly scripted, perhaps the first such soundbite designed specifically to address one issue. From then on it would be all soundbites to every question. Substance? Are you kidding? That way lies loserdom, although to be fair there were moments when Bill Clinton, GW Bush, and Obama did provide thoughtful answers to questions.

But we just don’t remember those, or much else about these debates, despite having two or three for each election, each lasting 90 minutes of so. That’s a lot of video and you’d think people would recall more than 30 seconds to a minute of them. But they don’t and as Campbell pointed out, it’s hard to therefore pin election wins and losses on anything that happens in any of them, let alone all of them.

Then there’s the influence of the debate moderators, with the turning point being CNN’s Candy Crowley unforgiveably inserting her opinion into the Romney-Obama debate in 2012, which helped out Obama at a point where Romney had him in a tight spot. At that moment the MSM’s partisan bias towards the Democrats began to escape their comparatively staid ideological bias to the Left and it’s only become more blatant since then.

The debate moderators today will be two CNN people: Jake Tapper, who has made multiple comparisons of Trump to Hitler, and Dana Bash, who hasn’t been much less toxic and whose husband was one of the 51 intelligence people who lied in 2020 by claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian “disinformation”. It should also be remembered that CNN passed questions in advance to Hillary Clinton during her debates with other Democrat contenders in 2016.

Questions have been raised as to why Trump accepted all these conditions designed to push the balance towards Biden as much as possible, and he recently answered by saying that if had rejected even some it would have been an excuse for Biden to call off the debate, claiming that Trump was the one who said “no”. Normally a candidate couldn’t pull such a stunt but Biden has air cover from 90% of the MSM.

One funny thing is that having no audience and microphone cuts that prevent him interrupting, might actually help Trump by curtailing his worst instincts.

But I think all that is irrelevant in the face of my second reason for not watching this debate, which is made up of these factors:

  • The most important aspect of modern TV debates, even more than creating scripted soundbites, is to lower expectations of yourself. That’s done not by self-deprecation but by talking up your opponent as perhaps The Greatest Debater Ever. But that can’t happen here because…
  • Biden’s bar has been set so low that even him standing for 90 minutes plus marginal coherence on some answers will be counted as a win. Five years of unedited video clips with incoherence, slurring of words, vacant spells, lost wandering, mindless reading of everything on the teleprompter, have done what Biden’s opponents could not do, demonstrate his increasing senility.

    The irony here is that Biden’s team can’t reverse this, despite recent desperate efforts talking about “Cheap Fakes” in telling people to not believe their lying eyes.
  • It’s just possible that Trump has lowered expectations for himself by accepting all this crap designed to go against him – but that would require some MSM balance in the aftermath and that ain’t happening. (It’s also possible that this will aid Trump by letting Biden talk endlessly – but the MSM will cover with edits and transcript “corrections”).
  • Biden will be on an endless attack loop about Trump (January 6, Convicted Felon, Worst Person In History, Convicted Felon, Threat to Democracy, Convicted Felon) – all the stuff that’s failed to dent Trump so far. Meanwhile Trump will ignore all that (hopefully) while going after Biden on inflation, war and open borders immigration, crime and the Israel-Hamas war. In short it will be entirely predictable.
  • Both men have all their negatives and positives already priced in from years of exposure. We’re not going to learn anything new about them in terms of character, temperament or anything else from these debates. It’s possible that we might if they talk about their policies, but those are also reduced to soundbites nowadays.

So that’s it. Now it is always possible that something unexpected and even dramatic will happen. Perhaps Biden will start bleeding out of an eyeball again, or fall over or lose his rag and challenge Trump to a fistfight or have a brain-freeze like McConnell did (and like he’s done himself). Similarly perhaps Trump will have a stroke or heart attack on stage – or lose it as Biden repeatedly calls him a “Convicted Felon”.

On that last, if you do watch, don’t take a shot every time Biden says that or you’ll never make it to the end.