By Mayank Chhaya-
Beyond the obvious question of who won and who lost the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump on CNN last night hangs the greater question of how jaded the two men professing to be the leaders of the free world are.
Biden halted like a driver at places even where there were no stop signs, while Trump rammed through every red light. One, namely Biden, was painfully diffident about stating the obvious facts of his three and half years in office, while the other, namely Trump, was sanguinely deceitful in piling up falsehoods about his four years.
If the world was watching, and there are pretty good prospects that it was, they must cringe at the complete lack of sophistication and vision of the two men. The overarching purpose for Biden was to convince America that his age, 81, does not stand in the way of his erudition and efficacy. He failed spectacularly there.
Trump, on the other hand, had no identifiable purpose other than serving lies and he succeeded spectacularly.
The lowest moment for Biden, and there were many during the close to 90 minutes on the podium, was when he uttered this disjointed mess: “We’re able to make every single solitary person … eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the, uh, with — with the Covid, or excuse me, with, dealing with, everything we have to do with, uh … Look … If … We finally beat Medicare.”
Quite uncharacteristically, Trump avoided pouncing on Biden’s obvious gaffes allowing the incumbent president to hoist himself with his own petard and hoist he did. Throughout the debate, if one can even call it that, Biden seemed to have sent his shadow to the event while Trump was out there in full albeit surprisingly restrained force.
In the runup to the debate Trump made ludicrous claims saying that Biden would come to it “jacked up” on performance enhancing drugs. In response, barely half an hour before the debate, the Biden campaign had him mockingly hold a can of water that said, “Zero Malarkey” with him saying, ‘I don’t know what they’ve got in these performance enhancers, but I’m feeling pretty jacked up. Try it yourselves, folks.” In the aftermath of his listless performance at the debate, many Democrats wished Biden were indeed somewhat jacked up.
It was expected to be a debate for Biden to lose rather than for Trump to win. However, from the get-go the president appeared visibly devoid of vigor, a situation made worse by his enfeebled voice which was later attributed to a cold.
Much was said in the media about how Biden had been intensely engaged in preparing for the debate at Camp David and how he was raring to go. That was not evident during the debate.
Trump on the other hand seemed to channel a line from the 1987 movie ‘The Untouchables’, directed by Brian De Palma, about the life of the Chicago gangster Al Capone. In one particularly memorable scene, Capone played brilliantly by Robert De Niro, says, “A man becomes preeminent, he’s expected to have enthusiasms.” Trump, who during a recent rally made a strange reference to Capone in a different context, clearly had more “enthusiasms.”
The two CNN anchors, Dana Bash and Jake Tapper’s questions, while substantive, were entirely predictable and delivered in a tone shorn of any discernible bias. They really kept their tone studiedly moderate in their role as moderators. In some ways that anodyne approach failed to enliven the debate.
In less than five minutes of the start of the debate it became obvious that the Democratic Party had a problem on hand in Biden’s unenthused presence. He frequently failed to make full use of his time, trailing off midway through his answers, which prompted Bash and Tapper to gently tell him that he has some more time left.
Unlike their 2020 debate, when Trump loomed over Biden interrupting him often, this time around the former president was remarkably disciplined even while dishing out manifest falsehoods about his record of economic mismanagement, disastrous handling of the Covid pandemic and so on.
What shocked and worried many Democrats was that despite being offered so many opportunities by Trump to call his bluff on many issues, Biden appeared to let them slide by.
It was a measure of the panic in the Democratic Party post-debate that they had to send Vice President Kamala Harris to CNN to salvage some of the situation. She tried to make a distinction between Biden’s lackluster performance—she called it a “slow start but strong finish”—by saying that the president should be judged on his three and half years of strong performance in office and not the one and half hours on the debate stage.
Soon after the debate even as Biden tried to mitigate his performance saying he could not debate a liar, there were subtle and not-so-subtle calls for him to step aside. On the other side, the Republicans were rejoicing in Trump’s iffy triumph.
