Joe Biden is well aware of what awaits him tonight in the first presidential debate. He’ll be standing 12 feet away from a catastrophically broken man who lies with every intake of oxygen, whose overriding aim is to splash in the sewer and entice Joe to join him.
Joe said it best at a recent virtual fundraiser: “I hope I don’t take the bait. I hope I don’t get baited into getting into a brawl with this guy, because that’s the only place he’s comfortable.” True that. As Peter Wehner, a former aide to three Republican presidents, points out, the imperiled incumbent “is shameless and without conscience, shatterer of norms and boundaries…who inhabits an alternative reality.”
My unsolicited advice for Joe is simple: Ignore Trump as much as possible. Ignore his relentless lies, because fact-checking him will eat up air time. Ignore his damning references to Hunter Biden, because most Americans (outside the cult) are already wise to Trump’s but-what-about con game. Ignore his inevitable claims that the pandemic would be a lot worse if not for his perfect brilliance, because most Americans (outside the cult) can do basic math and already know the score.
This is TV, where optics matter. Joe’s goal should be to demonstrate that there is only one president on that stage, and that it’s the guy who looks and sounds like a president. Talk directly to the American people, telling the plain-spoken truth, just as he has been doing for months.
Make the affirmative case for a presidency that will pull us back from the precipice. Make the affirmative case for a science-based game plan, staffed by apolitical experts, to squelch the pandemic, rebuild the economy, and put millions back to work. (Biden has already created a veritable “war-Cabinet-in-waiting.”) Make the affirmative case for protecting people’s health care – 20 million currently have Obamacare – from the relentless right-wing onslaught. And make the affirmative case for an America that values its western allies, an America that doesn’t suck up to foreign thugs, an America that is once again respected around the world. An America whose president pays his fair share of taxes.
Fortunately for Biden, he can probably score with that strategy simply by showing up and speaking in coherent sentences, because Trump has repeatedly – and inexplicably – lowered Joe’s bar for success. For months, Trump has depicted his opponent as a drooling font of senility who’s barely aware of his surroundings (“people will finally realize that Biden is just not there”), and this morning, one of his idiot spinners, Rudy Giuliani, confidently announced on Fox & Friends that Biden “has dementia. There’s no doubt about it. I’ve talked to doctors.”
Whatever. But even a candidate with minimal cognitive skills would be able to recite the most damaging stats of 2020 – that America, with only four percent of the world’s population, has roughly 23 percent of the world’s Covid cases and 21 percent of the deaths. Most Americans (again, those outside the cult) already know that Trump has exacerbated the worst public health catastrophe in the last 100 years, and, as such, they are primed to hear a president-in-waiting explain, in affirmative terms, what he would do to alleviate and ultimately end the suffering.
If Joe can stick to his plan and check his temper (which could flare if Trump gets too personal about Joe’s family), he’ll likely “win” the first debate. Assuming that means anything. Lest we forget, debate experts were virtually unanimous four years ago in their conviction that Hillary Clinton defeated Trump in all three debates. After one of loss, Trump even ranted, “They gave me a defective mic! Did you notice that? The mic was defective on purpose. Was that on purpose? Was that on purpose?”
But we all know how that race turned out.