The first 2024 presidential debate was a travesty, David Frum writes—because its whole premise was to treat a failed coup leader as a legitimate candidate for the presidency. https://theatln.tc/EoyYQUQ1
“Everything about the event was designed to blur the choice before Americans,” Frum continues. “Both candidates—the serving president and the convicted felon—were addressed as ‘President.’ The questions treated an attempted coup d’état as one issue out of many. The candidates were left to police or fail to police the truth of each other’s statements; it was nobody else’s business.”
Presidential debates were first televised in an age of comparative political consensus about limited, familiar options, Frum argues. The format has largely served the purpose of compelling viewers to ask, “Do I prefer the candidate in the red tie or the blue one?”
But we now live “in a political culture in which some of us think the supreme issue of our time was an attempted violent overthrow of the Constitution, while other Americans think it was Hunter Biden’s laptop,” Frum writes. “There are means and institutions to arbitrate those differences. That’s what elections do. But television debates cannot do it, because television debates don’t happen unless they get buy-in from both sides. Therefore, television debates are designed necessarily to ratify the concept of ‘both sides.’”
After Biden’s “fiasco” of a debate performance, “ferocious controversy will probably now erupt over Biden’s leadership of the Democratic Party,” Frum continues. “We’ll hear all kinds of plans to swap him out somehow. Maybe those plans will be workable, but probably not. Through the uproar, it will be important to keep in mind that this election is not about Biden. It’s about you and your commitments and your values. Biden is just the instrument. Like any instrument, he’s imperfect. But better an imperfect instrument than a would-be autocrat who demands a cult of personality.”
其实大部分米国选民现在是下面这个状态，辩论不辩论健康不健康都无所谓作者: indy 时间: 2024-7-2 09:40
Here’s some of the behind-the-scenes arguments going on in Washington DC, according to friends and contacts.
1.) There’s NO mechanism to replace a candidate, so the only person who can sack Biden is Biden.
2.) The only people he takes orders from are his wife and family—and they have told him to stay on and fight the election.
3.) If Biden can be persuaded to go (that's a big if), past precedents say the spot must go first to Kamala Harris.
4.) Insiders say she is not popular, so a shortlist of popular, articulate Democrats has been made “just in case”.
5.) But other insiders are warning that if Harris doesn’t get the job, there may be a significant loss of votes from women and people of color.
6.) Despite rumours, Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama are not on the list.
7.) At the moment, the strategy is for Biden to stay on and efforts to lift his image to redouble.
8.) Thus, odds on Trump being the next president are rising on all sides.
9.) Trump, meanwhile reacted to the debate with a statement that sounded like someone doing an exaggerated comedic impression of him.
The prime reason that Biden lost, Trump wrote on social media (referring to himself in the third person), was that:
“TRUMP WAS REALLY GREAT! In all fairness, and I say in complete and total modesty, many, on both sides of the political spectrum, have said it was the greatest single debate performance in the long and storied history of Presidential Debates.”
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