America’s Worst “Debate”
Another year, another abysmal presidential debate . The first televised presidential debate was in 1960 between Vice-President Richard Nixon and then Senator John F Kennedy. The debate is mostly remembered for Nixon’s poor appearance, which was a victory for Kennedy (who later won the election). There was not another debate again until 1976 (President Ford against then Governor Jimmy Carter) and not a particularly notable one until 1984 between President Reagan and former Vice-President Walter Mondale) in which Reagan stumbled and Mondale briefly saw a bump in the polls, in a 2nd debate Reagan won acclaim back with a famous joke and won in the largest landslide in American political history. Probably the only other notable debates were those in 1992 between George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot.
From 1976 to 1984 the debates were organized by the League of Women voters who generally did a good job of keeping them mature and somewhat academic. From 1988 to 2020 they were organized by the “Commission on Presidential Debates” an organization made up of Democrats and Republicans. While the debates haven’t always been good, it is a rare moment where the candidates have to actually face off, and until this cycle was seen as a requirement for the presidency.
Unfortunately over the years the debates have generally gotten worse and worse becoming effectively dual press conferences as opposed to proper debates. As a result the debates have understandably lost the respect of voters and are seen by many as pointless. However the debates should not be pointless, it should be an expectation for all the candidates to debate the issue in depth with each other. However the candidates and parties involved do not want that. Especially when the candidates are an octogenarian and a soon to be octogenarian.
For a long time it looked like there wasn’t going to be a debate in 2024. Both Biden and Trump refused to debate their primary opponents (Biden didn’t even acknowledge that he had several primary opponents). Trump seems to only wanna speak at rallies and with Logan Paul, Biden rarely does an interview that seems to last longer than about 10 minutes. The idea of both of these candidates who are clearly cognitively impaired seemed impossible.
However for some reason (probably due to Biden’s prospects getting dimmer and dimmer) both Biden and Trump agreed to a debate on CNN. Independent candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr (as well as Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver who will be on the ballot in every state) was excluded from the debate (likely because regardless of how he performed he would likely do better than Biden or Trump. This debate came with several rules all of which so far the candidates have followed (something not normally true of these debates) which results in both candidates generally giving short vague answers without any fact checking or follow up questions from the moderators. What this debate truly is, is an endurance match between two geriatrics in which however comes the closest to coherence will be the winner. Either way America will lose.
No matter who wins this year, the legacy of the 2024 election will be another blow to democracy. The duopoly put forward possibly the two worst candidates for president in any general election. Both candidates struggle to form basic sentences, forget basic names, dates, and facts and either would become the oldest elected president (a record previously set by themselves. Both candidates faced primary opponents in which for the most part they were the weakest candidates but their parties protected them from facing any serious scrutiny and both won their nominations effortlessly. The candidates are never really challenged and are hated by just about the entire American public. The only thing scarier than the 2024 election is the prospect of the 2028 election, if we actually have one.
