The mythology of the presidential debate — as a kind of civic single combat, mano a mano, with the nation’s future at stake — has its origins in the fall of 1960, when John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon faced off four times on live television. Decades later, the New Yorker writer and editor Roger Angell still could summon the feeling of “common pride and excitement,” the sense that the country had witnessed “something complex, historic and profoundly American.”
The enterprise, since then, has gone sour and flat, like so much else in our political life. CNN, which will host the first of two debates between President Biden and Donald Trump, is doing its best to gin up the old excitement, but the general feeling is one of unease. Shelby Grad, a Los Angeles Times editor, asks whether the debate is “the ultimate hate watch.” Matthew Continetti of the American Enterprise Institute, speaking for many, says he will watch “in a fetal position.”
But the problem, really, is not the debates. It’s the debaters — and this whole wretched rematch of a campaign. Time labels it “the dread election.” Across a wide range of backgrounds and beliefs, Americans describe themselves in similar terms: exhausted, indifferent, depressed. A recently categorized voter, the “double hater,” is the star of a report that identifies Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump as the most disliked pair of presidential candidates in at least 36 years — twice as disliked, in fact, as they were in 2020. Watching them jab at each other for 90 minutes is unlikely to make them more appealing.
Why bother, then? In an election this close, if the debates make even a small difference, they could make all the difference. This is why Mr. Biden pressed so hard for an early debate. There is a way for him to win it, and decisively, but he will have to override his instincts, defy the constraints and conventions of presidential debates and tell a more compelling story — with clarity and force — about America’s future if Mr. Trump returns to power.
Mr. Trump, for his part, likes his chances. He believes, despite clear and convincing evidence, that he is pretty good at debating. “I think I won every debate” in 2016, he said this month. At the very least, he can be confident that just about any misstep will be drowned out or denied by his apologists. Still, Mr. Trump — who cannot be pleased with polls that show, in the wake of his felony convictions, some attrition among independent voters — appears to be aiming for a knockout blow.
Mr. Trump will be unalterably himself: nasty, relentless, brazenly dishonest. The real variable is his opponent, who forever seems one stumble away from oblivion. But the risk is worth taking; clearly, the Biden team feels that something must be done to shake things up. According to Gallup, Mr. Biden’s approval rating flatlined about a year into his tenure, and nothing has moved head-to-head polling averages more than a point or two — not a vigorous State of the Union address, not a strong economy, not Mr. Trump’s convictions on 34 counts. Apart from August’s Democratic convention, which will be as devoid of drama as the party can manage, the debates are Mr. Biden’s best opportunity to command a national audience before November.
The predebate commentary has focused, to a large degree, on Mr. Biden’s halting appearance. This is a concern, but he has another, perhaps less obvious, liability: He is a poor storyteller. Catchphrases and callbacks are the currency of debates, but they are also how Mr. Biden tends to communicate as president. He has consistently failed to tell the story of his tenure and these times — how far the nation has come since 2020, where it’s going and what would happen during a second Trump term. He shows, instead, an undue faith in the power of a well-worn anecdote (“My dad used to say, ‘Joey …’”) or a tired phrase (“the soul of America”), each an open door that leads nowhere, really, except to another phrase (“This is the United States of America”). His speeches are a kind of crude pointillism in which the landscape or the portrait never quite coheres.
It is not a surprise, therefore, that Mr. Biden is eager to confront Mr. Trump with his own words; there are so many to choose from. “The things he said are off the wall: ‘I want to be a dictator on Day 1,’” Mr. Biden explained in an interview on June 6. “All I have to do,” he added, “is hear what he says, remind people what he says and what I believe and what he believes. He’s about him. I’m about the country.”
But that is not all Mr. Biden has to do. While he does need, of course, to define the contrasts between him and Mr. Trump, that cannot be achieved by a volley of phrases. “Dictator on Day 1” has been endlessly replayed since Mr. Trump said some version of that last December, and it has had no apparent effect on his electability. Neither did his call in 2022 for “termination” of the Constitution.
If Mr. Biden wants to make these malevolent words stick, he must bind them together in a vivid, stark and arresting picture of what American life will look like if Mr. Trump, bent on vengeance, is reinstated as commander in chief. The real question that Mr. Biden should answer is not “What did Trump say?” but “What will Trump do — and to what end?”
A presidential debate is a difficult forum for narrative. It is hard to tell a story — any kind of story — when your opponent is talking over you, the moderator is about to shut off your mic, and your lines are being shredded, in real time, into fragments on social media.
But it can be done. Barack Obama did it during a debate with Mitt Romney in October 2012. In less than a minute, he wove the disparate elements of Mr. Romney’s platform into a “philosophy” under which “folks at the top play by a different set of rules” and “you can make a lot of money and pay lower tax rates than somebody who makes a lot less; you can ship jobs overseas and get tax breaks for it; you can invest in a company, bankrupt it, lay off the workers, strip away their pensions; and you still make money.” This was not a riff. It was a resonant theme that, throughout his campaign, served as a call to action. “We have fought back for four years to get out of that mess,” he concluded. “The last thing we need to do is to go back to the very same policies that got us there.”
In a ringing speech marking the third anniversary of Jan. 6, Mr. Biden spoke of a “dagger at the throat of American democracy.” Yet that image remains, for the most part, an abstraction. On the debate stage with Mr. Trump and in every speech to follow, he must do more to make this future real, in its grim particulars. He should paint a picture of an America in which our system of self-government becomes, again, a marketing tool for a corrupt family business, in which the law is an instrument not of fairness and justice but of retribution, in which companies are freer to poison our skies and shortchange our workers, in which it is no longer safe to teach or report the truth, in which violence is not deplored but relished.
This is Mr. Trump’s America, and if Mr. Biden cannot do a better job of describing it, we might all have to live in it.
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