George Rebane
President Trump did not pull off a good debate last night. His biggest mistake was again his motor mouth – he kept interrupting Biden’s long answers in which the man had the best chance to display his faltering mental faculties. To such welcome interruptions Biden’s response was always a cherubic smile as he sent another ‘Saved again, thank you God’ heavenward. Hopefully, Trump’s debate coaches Giuliani and Christie will tell him to STFU next time when Bumblebrain is required to give a long answer.
The former VP spent most of his mic time just repeating unsubstantiated lies, the main one being that the president has totally mismanaged the country’s C19 response, and has no plan for it going forward. No one in the country has had the brains to make him answer as to what he would have done that would have produced markedly different results with his declared penchant to keep the economy locked down. The second biggest lie was that Obama put him in charge of the country’s economic recovery in 2009, and that singlehandedly he did an outstanding job – talk about the invisible man during those years. And perhaps the biggest obvious whopper was that the Democrats’ published platform does not back implementing the Green New Deal. The only benefit that Trump got was Biden being the first to launch ad hominem attacks – “clown”, “racist”, … – against the president.
Then it was Trump who left a lot of strong points and rebuttals on the table – was it poor prep or just his motor mouth getting in the way of considered thought? He didn’t say anything about creating an economy that delivered the lowest minority (especially black) unemployment rates in living memory. He didn’t say anything about being the most effective Mideast peacemaker in the last 50 years, and now being internationally nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He didn’t effectively rebut the ‘climate change causes wildfires and hurricanes, and the US going green will stop them’. His proper response would have cited the recent reports by NOAA and the IPCC (also in these pages) stating that neither agency could conclude that climate change has had any effect on the frequency and intensity of both kinds of disasters; that constant repetition of preventable manmade global warming nostrums continue as just politically motivated hysterical hype.
Finally, the president got a fantastic opening from Biden on the latter’s claim that his economic plan, based on green energy, would create 4M new jobs and result in a $1T marginal contribution to GDP. Since none of these new jobs would provide any benefits that current market-driven technologies already provide, their being mandated through more stifling government regulations and subsidies would actually inhibit economic growth – in short, they would have the same in/effect as did FDR’s depression era alphabet soup agencies. Frederic Bastiat explained the whole thing in his easy to understand ‘Broken Window Fallacy’. This would have been a major rebuttal to the socialists’ perennial approach to building economies, an approach that has failed every time it has been tried – you can’t build an economy with gratuitously created jobs and unnecessary spending.
Hopefully President Trump will do a much better job in Debate2 by letting Bumblebrain bumble, and remembering his list of strong responses.
[Addendum] At first I decided to leave out evaluation of Chris Wallace’s strictly one-sided performance as the debate’s moderator. At home we were aghast at how blatantly and asymmetrically Wallace conducted the session, lobbing softballs at Biden and Democratic talking-point gotchas at President Trump. (more here) Among his many egregious tactics was Wallace preventing Trump from correcting Biden’s continuous stream of obvious lies and indicting innuendos. This made it clear that the president was debating both Biden and Wallace. Overall, it was a very unprofessional and somewhat incompetent performance by Fox News’ star leftwing correspondent and host of its Sunday commentary program.
With regard to a better control of debaters talking out of turn and over each other so that no one can understand what either is saying, I am in favor of the moderator having control the debaters’ microphones. When it’s time for one participant to stop their diatribe and let the other one respond, then just turn on-and-off the appropriate mics. The mics can also be of the kind, or even baffled, to make them very directional – i.e. they will greatly attenuate sounds that arrive off-axis of their receiving beams. In Debate1 this would have allowed Wallace to effectively silence Trump, and permit Biden to deliver much longer and more revelatory responses with his usual acumen for extemporaneous public speech.
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