I didn't watch the debate. There's no need, as my perspective is already baked in. There's nothing Donald Trump could say or do that would change my opinion of him at this point. I mean, I suppose he could, but it's Mega Millions winning ticket improbable. He's a buffoon unworthy of the office, and a danger to the moral and physical integrity of our Republic. I chose to read some C.S. Lewis instead.
My wife, on the other hand, went to a watch party with her circle of Democratic Ladyfriends, so I figured I'd know how it all went by how she came through the door when she got home. If she was grim, it was a Biden-esque disaster. If she was angry, it was a close and tense exchange.
She bounced through the door exuberant, so it was clear it was not a good night for Trump, and that Harris had done as well as could be expected.
Online, the right wing folk I still follow were not nearly as happy, scrambling to spin the failure, with most of their ire aimed at the moderators of the debate.
When you complain about the referees, there's pretty much no question that your team lost.We all know this. It's a reality in all competitions, presidential debates included. For supporters of the forty fifth president of the United States, there's no question that the moderators of the debate between himself and Harris are to blame for his loss. He was repeatedly fact-checked, which is of course terribly terribly unfair and has nothing at all to do with his repeatedly saying things that are demonstrably untrue or delusional.
One could point out, I suppose, that both the venue and the rules for the debate had been negotiated by Trump, and that both the format and moderators had been approved by him. Nonetheless, he'd been grumbling about it for weeks, pre-justifying his loss, planting the scripted rationale for his failure in the minds of his base. Yet still, this was the best deal that he could negotiate, which...er...doesn't seem to say much about his deal-making skills.
But why should candidates be forced to negotiate and renegotiate the terms of every single debate? That makes this sort of unbalanced shellacking far more likely.
Shouldn't there be uniform rules for debates? What about an organization that made sure that everything is fair and agreed upon by a neutral arbiter, so that the debates are always on a consistent, fair and common ground? It could be run by representatives of both parties, who would mutually determine where and when the debates take place. That'd take the whole mess out of the hands of candidates and their campaigns, while insuring everything was on the up and up.
That would seem to fix the problem. Not doing that is so unfair!
That was, of course, exactly what the Commission on Presidential Debates did for most of my fifty-plus-year lifetime. Right up until 2022, when the Republican National Committee, under orders from former president Trump, announced that no Republicans were allowed participate in the Commission, and that the Republican Party would not cooperate with the Commission, because it had clearly been very very unfair to Trump in 2020.
The CPD, which still exists, offered to organize and moderate three debates this year, which would have fallen on September 16, October 1, and October 19, following the logical process of only holding debates after the parties had finalized their nominees.
Trump and his campaign refused to go along, and instead negotiated a much, much earlier debate directly with the Biden team.
We know how that worked out. It allowed Biden's team to test their candidate early, giving the Democrats a chance to completely reset after his grimly weak performance. Can you imagine what the race would look like today if the first 2024 Biden/Trump debate had happened last night?
Who negotiated that? Trump did. Who's responsible for that? Trump is. He picked those refs, and that venue, and that timeline. Yet still, he complains about how unfair it all is.
It's almost like that's all he knows how to do.
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