Mano a Mano Won’t Improve Your Life: the Last 2020 Debate

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This godawful campaign seems to drag on forever. Trump is like a bad knee or hip that has delivered nothing but pain for years. Just put me to sleep and replace it! Please!

So let’s cut to the chase. The last Biden-Trump debate was much better than the first and only one, which could hardly have been worse. Trump showed some uncharacteristic self-discipline—something he’s almost never shown in his presidential “leadership.” You could even conclude, if you cut Trump some slack, that last night he stuck to the rules. The young moderator, Kristen Welker, did a great job of keeping things mostly fair and civilized, with the help of a “microphone kill switch,” at least for some longer statements.

Who won? No one won on fact-based points. As is his wont, Trump was more aggressive, but he also lied more. He put Biden on the defensive for his long-ago support for minimum sentencing for drug offenses. But Trump lied about his own performance in the pandemic, the value and cost of windmills and solar arrays, Trump’s supposed beneficence to Black people, and the effects of his romance with Kim Jung Il. As always, his self-praise came in the form of gilded generalities, like his claim that no one since Lincoln had done more for Black people.

Biden made no major errors. When the moderator so directed (twice), Biden addressed his answers to the audience, while Trump stayed on the attack. Biden scored big points in understanding “the talk” that Black people give their kids to make them less likely to be killed by police, and again in emphasizing his working-class Scranton roots and concern for kitchen-table issues. But late in the debate, Biden also pulled an Al Gore by glancing at his watch; God help us all if that small, futile gesture has the same effect as for Al Gore.

All in all, I doubt the debate will make a difference. Biden outshined on empathy and character, and no voter who values those attributes will budge. Trump performed his cultivated role of attack-dog-in-chief. His devotees who crave a crude champion are not renowned for fact-checking. So insofar as concerns the actual election, the debate was probably a draw.

But the debate did raise an existential question for American democracy. Is this any way to run an election in the twenty-first century? How much of what a president actually does while in office consists of making and answering oversimplified charges, under tiny, completely artificial time limits, all alone on a stage with no advisers, background, briefing papers or reasoned discussion?

Nothing a president does in office is anything like that. Making policy, whether by legislation or regulation, takes months or years. A whole phalanx of cabinet members, advisors, legislators, experts and lobbyists considers the questions from every angle, writes reports and analyses, and delivers oral advice in endless meetings. Even in the Situation Room, with monitor screens showing hundreds of Russian nuclear missiles incoming, the President has his Joint Chiefs, his Secretary of State, and many other officials to advise him and correct errors. And even then he has up to fifteen minutes to respond.

No, the debate format is an obsolete verbal form of jousting, a holdover from the medieval days of knighthood, when peronal valor, aggression and trickery actually mattered because the king often led battles in person. It has about as much relevance to skill in actually running a modern government as putting the candidates in a boxing ring would.

It’s long past time to find better ways for voters to inform themselves and decide. How candidates fare in a verbal mano a mano has little or no relevance to their ability to improve your life if they win. If nothing else, the four-year agony of Trump’s presidency so proves.

That said, some of Trump’s lies may have hit home with his base, or even with the rare-as-a-unicorn undecided voter. So they merit a quick and steady response from Biden’s campaign.

First and most important, Trump lied profusely about energy. He lied about Biden’s stance on fracking and natural gas and about the benefits and problems of solar arrays and windmills. Biden’s campaign must refute these lies as often and as vigorously as it takes.

In particular, Biden’s campaign must convince voters that: (1) Biden supports fracking everywhere but on federal lands (to preserve our parks and wilderness there); (2) he knows that natural gas is the best and least polluting transitional fuel; (3) we are solving the intermittency of wind and sun with regional power grids, batteries and other energy-storage devices; and (4) all of the above, without exception, will provide new, good jobs that pay as much or more than extracting fossil fuels and that are infinitely cleaner and safer than drilling for oil or digging for coal. In Texas, for example, Biden could do worse than quote the late oil buccaneer T. Bone Pickens, who wanted to invest a trillion dollars in Texas wind and said, “I have the same feelings about wind as I had about the best oil field I ever found.”

Making these points is job one if Biden hopes to win Texas, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, let alone North Dakota or West Virginia. His campaign must acquaint voters with the realities of our age: (1) fossil fuels are obsolescent and running out; (2) natural gas is by far the cleanest and best transition fuel; (3) both natural gas and renewable energy will provide millions of good-paying, clean and safe jobs for the foreseeable future; and (4) all of the above will spread the good jobs around, including to small towns and rural areas, because natural gas and renewable energy are scalable and local or easily distributed.

Second, Biden must have better answers to Trump’s bogus charges that he and Obama did nothing for eight years, especially on health care and pandemics. A large part of the reason for inaction was scorched-earth obstruction on Republicans’ part. Another big part was the extreme-libertarian philosophy among Trump’s GOP. Do you really want to give your aunt, uncle, grandparents, teachers and co-workers Covid just to show how macho and “free” you are?

If Biden wants to avoid the same obstruction again, he must win the Senate on his coattails. So he’d better start showing, with chapter and verse, how Republican ideology has killed jobs, undermined our national competitiveness, and created an atmosphere in which wearing something as simple and cheap as a mask is anathema. Tell that to China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, all of which have fought Covid far more successfully than we, and with little more than masks, testing, good leadership and good citizenship.

Joe Biden is a good, smart and decent man. Unlike Trump, he will read his briefing papers, trust his Cabinet and his experts and govern by consensus, except when the experts are closely divided and he alone must decide. He knows what he doesn’t know, which is far more than Trump knows. Biden also understands from long experience how complex and potentially divisive are all the huge problems will still must solve.

But in piling up an unquestionable lead, Biden may have lost ground last night. Mano a mano is not his forte: he’s a problem solver, not a fighter. Nor should fighting be a requirement for any president of a nation and an economy as minutely diversified and specialized as ours.

Twitter has accustomed our voters to making life-or-death decisions based on one-liners. So the Biden campaign has some work to do to win over states like Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas, let alone the upper-midwestern states that narrowly put Trump in the White House.

That work is vital if Biden is to win the 400+ electoral votes that he and Trump’s gross unfitness deserve, and that our nation needs to see to real change and to heal its wounds. This battle won’t be over unless and until Trump concedes (and probably flees abroad to avoid the noose inexorably closing around him.) So let the good work accelerate relentlessly until he hollers uncle.

Personal Endnote: I was actually recovering from a shoulder replacement on election day 2016. I awoke from anesthesia only to find that Trump was president-elect. I had considered scheduling replacing my other shoulder this election day, so I could awaken to the nightmare’s conclusion, but I’ve already missed that cutoff.

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