In any real world scenario, a presidential candidate who lies his way through a Presidential debate would be writing his own political obituary. The only reason there's even a problem is because we are making it out to be a problem. Biden had a bad night. So did Trump, in all but one of the other debates in which he's participated in. And June 27, 2024 was a bad night for him, too.
June 27th's performance by Trump wasn't impressive. What was visible, whenever Biden was speaking, was the ugly scowl on Trump's bloated face, that was more frustrated and angry as the night wore on. Trump could not give a straight answer to a single question, could not marshall a single fact, not only about Biden's Presidency, but about his own, and could not handle criticism. He cannot debate. He has monologues that he spouts over and over and over, he has a small vocabulary and has few adjectives that he uses when he is critical.
Trump demonstrated such absolute contempt, not only for the American people, but especially for his own political base, delivering the kind of off the top of his head lying that almost every single one of us would have been punished for telling when we were children. That's not winning a debate. And while we do seem to have more than our fair share of ignorant, stupid, uneducated and easily duped people who allow him to play on their own selfishness and throw their patriotic love of country under the bus, we also have a lot of people who have enough common sense to realize what is going on and show a little bit of intelligence, sensibility, reason and patriotic pride.
People saw that. In most of the focus groups, and in the post-debate analysis where voters were brought in to provide commentary, it was pretty clear that Trump didn't move the needle in his direction at all. I didn't hear anyone say, "Yeah, Biden was quiet and seemed a little out of it so I'm going to cross over and vote for Trump, because I think a pathological liar would be a better choice."
But for some reason, among Democrats, a party whose political campaigns are known for their heavy weighing on issues and logical conclusions to the kind of folly Trump puts out, but who are also known for not being able to grasp a clear, concise, well-communicated narrative, there is frustration and panic at every corner when things do not go as planned. Maybe that comes from the pressure of holding together such a diverse coalition of voters, and always being afraid we're going to lose this group or that group over this issue or that issue.
As much as it pains me to say this here, it needs to be said and the comparison needs to be made. What if the situation were reversed, and a Republican candidate for President had just emerged from a less-than-expected debate performance that left the campaign and party leadership stunned? Would we hear almost immediate commentary about how to get the candidate, especially an incumbent, to step down? Would we even see, anywhere in public, the hand-wringing, wailing, caterwauling and calls for this to happen? What would the Republicans be doing now if this had been the case? And that's a relevant question, because their leadership was quite concerned that Trump's inability to follow a debate format would lead to the kind of display that actually occurred last night. They're breathing a collective sigh of relief that the attention Democrats are focusing on Biden is preventing their panic from being nearly as visible, and for allowing them a repreive.
Because the Republicans and their presumptive nominee are headed for a bigger crisis than the Democrats now have over Biden's debate performance. Their candidate is going to be sentenced for 34 felony convictions in just a couple of short weeks. Now tell me, what would you rather have on the table?
And how are they handling it? Well, let me use an analogy from the old western movies and television programs I used to watch by the hour, during summer break. They are like the settlers, lumbering westward in wagon trains, when they see the Indians forming for an attack on the ridge. They circle the wagons. They form a defensive perimiter, take up positions inside the perimiter and make the Indians attack across the open country. They give up nothing. The rhetoric doesn't resemble anything close to the wailing, hand wringing, caterwauling of Democrats who are still, after almost eight years of observing Donald Trump and MAGA politics, playing the same old politics as usual game.
Trump handed the Biden campaign and the Democrats running for Congress a complete agenda to pick apart during the debate. For their part, every position they've taken is a winner. Trump provided no answers to a single challenging question. Did anyone get that? He even wavered when admitting they are losing in the states on pro-choice rights when he brought up Ohio and Kansas. Basing his debate performance almost completely on false information, on lies if we call it like it is, was a complete and total admission that he has absolutely nothing to offer the American people.
And frankly, while I hate to say this as well, if Democrats don't get it together and take advantage of the gifts that are being given to us, pull the party together, "circle the wagons," and defend the perimiter, then we deserve to lose.
I'm not likely to be around more than another decade. I'm almost 70 and not in great health, and the next President is probably the last one I'll know in my lifetime. But I've spent my life in education, teaching and administration, working with our nation's youth, trying to instill a sense of political awareness and responsibility in them. I feel sorry for the younger generations who may, under a Trump Presidency, have to endure what no generation of Americans has had to endure since 1860.
There's a difference between constructive criticism and defeatism. And I'm appalled to hear, coming from Democrats who have within their ranks some of the brightest and best journalists, politicians, and some of the best educated, reasonable, progressive thinking members of Congress and of state legislatures, what I sense as defeatism, in the face of an election against such an evil, anti-American personage as Donald J. Trump. We have the collective ability to convince every American who is not already convinced that his getting back into political power would be one of the worst things that could happen to the United States of America.
This debate must be our turning point, our wake-up call, whatever analogy we want to use to identify it, but it must be the moment that we come together as a party, set aside all of the petty bickering, fussing, hand-wringing and typical, traditional, old-fashioned politics, and unite to decisively defeat the common enemy of the American constitutional democracy, Donald J. Trump.
We have truth on our side.
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