The most important thing to remember about U.S. presidential debates is they are historic, essential, decisive, and absolutely necessary for Americans to properly select their next commander in chief.
You will be hearing in coming weeks that the upcoming televised verbal confrontations are obviously so very important that every single citizen who cares about the nation should watch or listen to decide how to vote.
Until, that is, the debates actually happen.
Then, no one agrees on anything. Both parties will claim a clear victory. Committed viewers will say their favored candidate won in a walk. Others will go “Meh” and switch channels before the last over-priced commercial.
We’re witnessing the same scenario already. Joe Biden’s puppeteers and supportive media claim he pulled a fast one on the former president.
They surprised everyone with secret advance talks with a Democrat CNN. They got what they wanted — just two debates, no live audiences, and early ones on the calendar because the tone-deaf Bidenomics campaign is dead-in-the-water right now.
Donald Trump, who ducked every GOP primary debate to deny other contenders his presence, agreed immediately. Everything Trump knows, he knows for certain.
He’s confident, maybe a little too confident. Polls are not predictive. But they’re treated that way anyway. They show Trump doing not great in key states, but better than Biden, which is what will matter in 170 days.
That’s a very long time, even if you don’t measure it in hours (about 4,100) or seconds (14.7 million). Plenty of time for some adverse health event for either or both of the two oldest presidential candidates ever (Biden 81, Trump 78 next month).
Plenty of time for any number of foreign events and malevolent actors to scare comfortable Americans, already anxious over a current leader with clearly diminished faculties.
Plenty of time for well-financed demonstrators pretending to espouse some made-up concern to repeat their violent campus disruptions at party conventions — Republicans July 15-18 in Milwaukee and/or Democrats in Chicago five weeks later, as they did in 1968.
Debates have forever changed presidential elections. They once were sold as “must-watch TV,” which they could be with substantive policy questions and time for detailed answers.
But TV being TV and modern viewers having been trained to expect quick cuts and quips, presidential debates have become more like staged reality shows with beauty contest questions seeking short sound bites for headlines. “How would you end the Ukraine war? You each have 30 seconds.”
Previous debates came later in the cycle when vacations were over and voters more focused. But a confluence of events and strategies has conspired to change political priorities this cycle.
Widespread early voting means millions would cast their ballots before traditional debate dates as if answers to the gotcha questions from media celebs actually shaped decisions, instead of merely confirming voters’ existing impressions.
These two candidates are likely the best-known wannabe presidents ever.
No doubt some earnest folks will decide their vote brd on debate-viewing. Even though nothing in TV debates resembles anything a president with a vast staff would ever experience, except perhaps remembering a rehearsed comeback from an anticipated criticism.
If being knowledgeable and judicious mattered in TV debates, then voters would have swung to a prescient Mitt Romney in 2012 when he warned in the Denver debate that Russia remained a serious strategic challenge with territorial ambitions.
Barack Obama, his vice president, Joe Biden, and media mocked Romney as outdated and uninformed. But then, oops, just 15 months later, Vladimir Putin’s Russia seized all of Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
That was the precursor to its full-scale 2022 invasion when — Oh, look! — the same voters had made that former vice president into a president after another set of TV-show debates.
Typically, politicians doing well in a campaign prefer early voting because it locks in voter decisions and prevents damage from October surprises.