Five Takeaways from the First 2024 Presidential Debate
(If you'd prefer, you can read this piece on the web.)
Everyone’s got their opinions about the debate last night, so I suppose I may as well share mine.
1. Biden Looked and Sounded Terrible
There’s just no way around this: Biden looked and sounded old, weak and infirm. Some part of my brain kept wondering when someone in a white coat was going to find him and gently lead him back to his room. It may be that it’s hard to say exactly what makes a person look presidential, but I think we can all agree that this wasn’t it. This was one of those rare instances when it’s hard to imagine a show like SNL basing a skit on a political event, just because Biden has already nailed the caricature, leaving no room for further exaggeration.
Trump, on the other hand -- well, he looked like Trump, which is never a good thing, in my book -- but he looked and sounded firm and resolute and relatively healthy and strong.
And then, or course, if we extrapolate over the next four and a half years, as we all are doing, to the end of the next presidential term... it’s hard for any of us, no matter our political predispositions, to honestly say that we can picture Biden going the distance.
Biden and his team took that away from us last night.
2. Biden’s Performance Can’t Be Explained Away
I understand the policy differences between Trump and Biden. And nothing about the debate changed my understanding of those differences. And I’m firmly in Biden’s camp on those policy issues.
But let’s face it: I just read a piece saying that over half of the members of Gen Z consider themselves to be video influencers. We’re all watching more videos today than ever before, using one platform or six others. And live sports broadcasts are more valuable than they’ve ever been.
And much of what I read these days are dire warnings about how AI can be used to distort still and moving images to make you believe something that is not now and never was true.
So what does all of this tell you?
- We have become a society that puts supreme stock in what we can see through our digital eyes.
- We value seeing real-time performances as they unfold, because that’s as close to reality as we can get when observing public events.
Hopefully none of this comes as a surprise to anyone. These modern truths should be well understood by anyone with any aspirations to have influence over public perceptions these days.
And so, these elements of the debate broadcast that were supposed to work in Biden’s favor, ended up working entirely against him.
There were no interruptions from the audience, or from the other candidate. Everyone watching got to see both candidates performing in real-time, unfiltered, under identical conditions.
And we all saw and heard the same things: Biden stumbling over his words, mushing syllables together, getting things confused, looking like a very senior citizen who had somehow been separated from his caregivers....
These are things that cannot be unseen.
We were worried about the Republicans taking things out of context, or using AI to distort reality. We no longer need to worry. Because the video footage they were given last night will not need any doctoring, and everyone knows that it was an honest and straightforward recording of what actually happened.
It does no good at this point to try to say that appearances don’t really matter, that we all need to just focus on substance.
If you volunteer to stand before an audience on live TV for 90 minutes, standing across the stage from your opponent, then you had better be prepared to make a strong visual and auditory impression. And if you can’t deliver that, then you deserve to be judged on appearances, because that’s the medium you chose.
3. Biden’s Team Is In Trouble
Biden’s appearance was so bad that it cannot help but call into question his ability to assemble a capable team of advisers and assistants. I mean, they knew going into this that Trump’s background is mostly in television, right? So they had to figure that he would have people who could make him look good in front of a camera. And Trump’s team delivered.
And so, in response, Biden’s team prepared their candidate by... what? Hiring the local embalmer to do his makeup? And what were they doing in Camp David when they were supposed to be prepping him? Couldn’t they have used a shock collar or something to get him to close his mouth when he wasn’t speaking?
If last night had been a test to see if Biden could pass his public speaking 101 test, he would have flunked. I was on my high school debate team, and I watched my son perform as part of a mock trial team at the college level. If last night had been a test to see if Biden could qualify to join either of those amateur groups, he would have politely been told to seek some other sort of extracurricular activity that didn’t require him to stand and speak in front of an audience.
What were Biden’s people thinking?
4. This Was A Major Fail for the Mainstream Media
The media has two jobs:
- Accurately tell us what’s going on in the world.
- Provide us with reasonable prognostications about what’s likely to happen in the future.
But as far as I can tell -- and correct me if I’m wrong here -- I can’t recall any of the usual media sources preparing us for anything like what we saw on TV last night. My impression was that Trump would be babbling and out of control, and that Biden would probably be boring but solid, barring one or two possible gaffes.
But that’s now what I saw... not what any of us saw.
So now once again we have to question everything we’re being told by the mainstream media.
I mean, I’ve come to expect a little spin put on my news, but the disconnect between the reality we saw last night with our own eyes and what I’ve been reading can’t just be put down to a little liberal bias.
5. Our Political Parties Are Both Failing Us
I realize that none of us typically gets to pick our own personal favorites when it comes to voting for president every four years. We only get to choose between two candidates, and so we pick whichever one we think is the better of the two, even if they have some traits that we consider flaws.
But it is inconceivable to me that we could go into the voting booths this November having to choose between one candidate who shamelessly and artlessly distorts both principles and facts to favor himself and fellow members of the monied class, versus another who generally seems smart and principled but was last seen shuffling towards a retirement home.
I realize that we are a society made up of many diverse perspectives, and that we won’t always agree with one another, but if this is the best our political system can do, then we’re in trouble.
I read something today asking the question whether Biden would be allowed to stay in charge if he were, in his current condition, in the position of CEO for any major Fortune 500 corporation.
Than answer is probably no, and is telling.
But here’s another question for you: how many of those same Fortune 500 companies fail to practice any kind of meaningful succession planning? And how many fail to identify future candidates for senior leadership? How many fail to enroll such candidates in purposeful development programs? And how many of these programs fail to include any sort of rotation systems, to expose future leaders to various parts of the organization they might someday be asked to govern?
No serious corporation would be guilty of such omissions. But both of our political parties seem to be clueless when it comes to such questions.
Instead we have an entirely haphazard process for bringing forward potential candidates for our nation’s highest office.
And so this is what we get: hucksters, some of the dimmest stars from tv and film, members of political dynasties, members of Congress who have stuck around so long that they’re well past their sell-by dates, plus the occasional state governor who sneaks in there.
There’s got to be a better way.