Presidential debates: substance or sideshows?

The major risks that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden faces between now and the election are his three debates with President Trump, the first one scheduled for today.

That is true not because he doesn’t have a grip on the serious life-and-death issues facing the nation and the world, but because of themedia.

To explain: We can be confident that reporters will be waiting breathlessly for a

Biden gaffe.

The media have been very successful in painting Biden as a man prone to mistakes even though many of them involve no more that meaningless slips of the tongue, i.e. he referred to COVID-19 as COVID-9, was caught using an expletive on an open mic, etc. One news outlet dubbed him the “Gaffe Machine.”

But these errors make good news stories. Indeed, the debates generally are evaluated not on sophisticated analysis of complicated issues but rather on incidents which have little or no relevance but make enticing headlines.

For instance, during the primaries candidate Elizabeth Warren “won” a debate because of her vicious attack on rival Michael Bloomberg. No one wrote, however, that she hurt herself by changing the public’s perception of her as a thoughtful and studious candidate to a political bit bull. Candidate Kamala Harris, now the Democratic vice presidential candidate, also imploded shortly after savagely upbraiding Biden in another debate.

The examples are endless on how themedia cover the debates and seek “exciting” angles which, when analyzed, are rather insipid, deserving, at best, a paragraph or two.

President Reagan “beat” Jimmy Carter in 1980 with the following quote which has made the history books: “There you go again.” The line proved so successful, he used it again four years later against Walter Mondale.

To this day, I have no idea why this sentence is to prescient, newsworthy, and incisive, or why it is considered so compelling.

In 1988, in the vice presidential debate, after the Republican candidate Dan Quayle compared himself to President Kennedy, the Democratic candidate, Lloyd Bentsen, responded, “Senator… you are no Jack Kennedy,” dominating news coverage the next day.

(Four years later, Quayle’s entire political career was damaged because, while visiting an elementary school, he misspelled “potato” adding an “e” at the end. The irony: he was reading from a teacher’s inaccurate flashcard. The larger question: Did this incident really deserve more than a lighthearted paragraph? As they say, what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?)

George H. W. Bush was lambasted in 1992 for checking his watch (in a cutaway; he wasn’t even on camera) during a three-way debate against Bill Clinton and third-party candidate Ross Perot while Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore was caught sighing “too much” when he faced George W. Bush in 2000.

The Biden portrayal follows a similar pattern in themedia which described former President Gerald Ford as bumbling because he tripped a few times before cameras and drove several golf balls into spectators on the fairways.

This despite the fact, as Harold Holzer recounts in his recently published book, “The Presidents vs. the Press,” Ford was probably the best athlete ever to hold the office.

(The inadvertent implication of the media’s portrait of Ford is that if he can’t walk without tripping or hit a golf ball straight, well then, he certainly can’t handle issues dealing with the environment, racism, the budget, or the possibility of a nuclear holocaust.)

The point is we can expect little from news reports covering the debates on how the respective candidates would solve the nation’s most serious problems.

We can be confident that Biden and his advisers recognize that the media are salivating in anticipation of a gaffe and, thus, are focusing on how to avoid the pitfalls of a minor verbal mistake, factual error or an inadvertent physical movement that might attract the attention of hungry news hawks.

They understand that substance is trumped (no pun intended) by trivia. But the latter is much more damaging. (Lies, corruption, etc. aside, Trump has made more than his share of gaffes but escaped censure.)

So in his mock practice debates, Biden and his advisers are also considering whether he should use the line, “There you go again.”