The debate Thursday night between President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden was so substantive and informative it sometimes bordered on boring, reflecting a level of gravitas we need more of in politics today.
Trump can be counted on to bring at least a minimum level of bombast. He has a knack for enlivening things even when it seems safe to nod off.
Whether Trump laid a glove on Biden isn’t yet clear, but it was to moderator Kristen Welker’s credit that, even if she didn’t invoke Hunter Biden, she also didn’t try to stop Trump from doing so.
Biden responded mostly by trying to change the subject to Trump’s foreign dealings. Eventually, Biden will need to answer in more detail questions about his son’s foreign business arrangements, and his attempt to blame Russia for these allegations is all but certain to seem obviously nonsensical.
Over an hour and a half, the debate also covered the pandemic, health care in general, foreign business dealings, the economy, immigration, race relations, climate change, energy and leadership. Viewers were able to hear stark and substantial differences between the candidates.
On the more than 500 children separated from their parents at the border, Biden did a good job making the emotional case for the tragedy of such circumstances. But Trump was effective in explaining efforts being made to reunite children and parents and the care that children are receiving in the meantime.
And when Trump charged that the Obama administration initially supplied the notorious “cages” that housed children, Biden never answered Trump’s repeated question: “Who built the cages, Joe?”
On how governors have handled covid-19, Biden scored with his comment that he doesn’t look at states “in the way [Trump] does, blue states, red states,” saying that to him, “they’re all the United States.”
Trump’s upbeat outlook on covid-19 may strike some as too rosy, but it stood in contrast to Biden’s “dark winter” and suggestion that Americans are learning not to live with the virus but “to die with it.” Voters tend to prefer optimism to defeatism.
Trump was good Thursday evening, and probably not just because of the debate sponsors’ decision to mute microphones if necessary to allow for uninterrupted answers. The president took a different approach to this debate than he did to the first one, which was a disaster for him. Trump’s performance Thursday encapsulated what makes him frustrating for those who want him to succeed. This is the version of Trump many of his supporters want to see more often—smart, informed and even presidential. Sadly, he doesn’t show up often enough.
As moderator, NBC’s Welker offered a master class in handling the two candidates. It stood in sharp contrast to recent examples of what not to do at the competing town halls that replaced the canceled second debate.
As always, the winner of Thursday’s debate will be largely a matter of partisan opinion. The undisputed winner is journalism. After too many missteps in the Trump era when the media has fallen short of past standards, Welker did a good job of returning some respect to the profession.
Editorial