Better buckle up for the first Trump-Biden debate
If Biden can rise above that very low standard, Trump’s decision to lower expectations for him could turn out to be the dumbest move of the campaign.
Debates don’t often decide the outcome of a presidential campaign — but tonight’s scheduled collision between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden could be an exception to the rule if Biden comes out a winner.
It has happened before. In 1980, Democratic President Jimmy Carter and Republican challenger Ronald Reagan were closely matched in the polls before they met for their only debate.
Carter had presided over a disastrous four years, including an economic recession. But undecided voters were worried that Reagan, at
69 the oldest presidential candidate in history, might not be up to the job.
A t the debate, Reagan was at the top of his game — and deftly parried Carter’s attacks with a line he delivered more in sorrow than in anger: “There you go again.” A week later, the challenger won in a landslide.
Tonight, Biden will be aiming for that kind of outcome.
Like Reagan in 1980, he’s challenging an incumbent who’s broadly unpopular. Unlike Reagan, he has a clear advantage in most national polls — but he still needs undecided voters to shift his way in the swing states that will decide the election.
Most strikingly, Biden, like Reagan, needs to dispel the notion — propounded relentlessly by Trump and his supporters —that at 77, the former vice president has descended into senility.
“Biden can’t put two sentences together,” the president claimed in July. “I don’t know if he’s all there,” he said last week.
If Biden can rise above that very low standard, Trump’s decision to lower expectations for him could turn out to be the dumbest move of the campaign.
So Step 1 for Biden is clear. If he performs as cogently as he did in the final primary debates in March or during his appearance at a CNN town hall Sept. 17, he wins.
Trump’s goal is to knock Biden off stride — to rattle him with wild attacks, distract him by distorting his positions or make him angry by attacking his son Hunter’s malodorous business deals in Ukraine and China.
Biden has a temper, and when it gets the better of him — as it did last year in Iowa, when he called a voter “a damn liar” — he doesn’t look presidential.
Trump approaches a debate like a WWE wrestler, not a boxer. When his opponents cautiously jab and parry, “Trump decks them over the head with a metal chair,” Judd Legum of the newsletter Popular Information wrote.
For more tips on strategy, I consulted with Philippe Reines, who advised Hillary Clinton in her 2016 presidential campaign.
Reines — who in Clinton’s prep sessions played the role of Trump, in an ill-fitting blue suit and too-long red tie — told me Biden needs to find a measured way to parry the president’s attacks.
“You can’t out-Trump Trump,” he warned. “But you can’t stand there and be a punching bag, either.”
“Biden should begin by addressing Trump directly,” he advised. “He should say, ‘ Before we start, I gotta say something: We’re all on to you. A hundred million people are watching tonight, and they already know how you operate. When you say something is fake, we know that means it’s real. When you say something is a lie, that means it’s probably the truth. If you stand up here tonight and make things up about me, it’s not going to work. We all see right through it.’ “
Tonight’s stakes will be high. If Trump knocks Biden off his game, he can buy time to stage a comeback over the five weeks that remain. But if Biden does well, he can solidify his lead and take a step toward putting the election away. Either way, the debate will be well worth watching.