Joe Biden, unless he has some huge brain fart, is going to win the debates. But it’s not likely to help him very much, for two reasons. So I would caution his campaign against thinking they can lock this thing down with solid debate performances.
My advice would be: Rather than trying to win the debates, Biden should give Donald Trump the room to lose them. I’ll explain what I mean by that below, but first, let’s get to those reasons.
Reason one why winning won’t matter much is that everyone expects him to win. This may sound kind of odd given how shaky he was in those early debates, but I think we can agree in retrospect that that was because he was on a stage with 15 other people who were all attacking him. By the time he got one-on-one with Bernie, he did very well. And in that recent town hall, he was terrific. There were a couple uh-oh moments, but he put on his boots and slogged his way through them.
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Democrats almost always win the debates because Democrats know more policy than Republicans, generally speaking. Does that sound obnoxious? Well, sorry, it’s true. Forget Donald Trump, who’s an obvious policy idiot. I mean that even your average smart Republican doesn’t sweat the policy details of climate change because he doesn’t believe in climate change; doesn’t know as much about how the Obamacare exchanges work because her chief preoccupation with those exchanges is that they be banished from the face of the Earth. And so on.
Hillary Clinton won the debates, Al Gore won the debates. Mitt Romney crushed Barack Obama in that first debate, when Obama seemed like he was miffed that he was missing a Bears game. All three lost in November. They lost for very different reasons, of course, but the point is, their winning debate performances did not lift them to victory. Biden, who’s forgotten 10 times the policy Trump knows, should not expect any sort of bump from winning these debates. He’ll just be doing what everyone figured he’d do.
Second, as we know in this hyper-electronic era, the post-debate spin might matter more than the event. Republicans and Fox News are going to try to say Trump crushed Biden and edit together whatever malapropisms emerge from Biden’s mouth and play them over and over and over. They will try to tell America: Forget what you saw. What you saw isn’t what happened. This little clip we’ve edited creatively is what happened. And some people are dumb enough to buy that.
Biden’s team and all the leftie groups pouring money into the race have to be ready to counter that. This is absolutely vital. It seems clear that Trumpland is praying for Biden to have a senior moment so they can push the “he’s too old” line. If that happens, it happens. But if Trump has one of those moments, progressive groups and the Lincoln Project have to pounce. If Trump looks befuddled in any way for a few seconds, that has to be talking point No. 1 for Democrats. That will kneecap a major Trump argument.
Broader point: Have a game plan for the 72 hours after the first debate to counter the Fox framing, and the emphasis here should be on Trump (Trump was confused, Trump lied, etc.) rather than on Biden. We’ve seen Fox and the GOP turn a debate loss into a victory in those 72 hours, most notably with Dubya and Gore. There’s no excuse, 20 years later, for not being ready for that.
And to do that spin really effectively, we return to my main point, about Biden giving Trump the space to lose. Trump is going to say crazy things. He’s going to say he did a brilliant job handling the virus (I hope Chris Wallace asks him about that A+ grade he gave himself to Bob Woodward). He’ll brag, and lie, about his sham health-care “plan.” He’ll say he’s accomplished more than any president ever. And so on.
Biden should counter these things, of course, but he shouldn’t gild the lily here. Trump’s self-discrediting words are just that: self-discrediting. Just let him talk, and, well, expose himself. Let him show America once again what a coarse buffoon he is. Biden should be calm, presidential, nice-old-man-next-door tranquil.
One specific thing I would like to see him do, which I’ve run by a few friends and they all went hmmm, that’s good, hadn’t thought of that: mention Halloween. And Thanksgiving and Christmas. As in, the holidays are coming, and in vast stretches of this country, children won’t be able to go out trick-or-treating. November will bring Thanksgiving, and already, many families are starting to come to terms with the reality that they won’t be going over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house this year. Millions of grandparents won’t be seeing their grandkids. And Christmas, that most precious of holidays for so many of us will be the saddest Christmas many of us have ever experienced as families aren’t able to gather and reenact their favorite traditions, and of course far sadder than that for the many who’ve lost loved ones.
And then the clincher: “This is his fault, my fellow Americans. With better leadership, we could have been at a point now where we could at least have gatherings of our loved ones. Not under this president.”
That’s the Biden who appeals to middle America—the guy who’s just like them. That’s who he is at his best, and that’s who he should be Tuesday night.
