Sometimes, a single sentence defines the 90 minutes of a presidential debate. The one that will go down in history as the most disjointed and least well-rounded debate in the history of US electoral face-to-faces, will go down in history as the one between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in Atlanta on Thursday.
Biden delivered it at the start: “We’ll be able to help secure all of those things that we need to do, child care, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our health care system, making sure that we can make every single person eligible for what… I’ve been able to deal with Covid, excuse me, dealing with everything to do with…,” the US president said before losing the thread and freezing for several seconds. “We finally beat Medicare,” continued Biden, at 81 years old, the oldest occupant of the White House in US history.
The moment was not pleasant to see live. And it will still not be so the millions of times that this isolated piece of debate is consumed on social networks in the coming days. It was early proof that one of the toughest nights of her political career awaited Biden, who had arrived a week later preparing for the big occasion. From that moment on, you could almost hear his advisors asking for the time: the problem was that there were still 80 minutes of debate left.
Trump, emboldened when his rival lost the thread again a while later, said almost as a reflex that he had not understood what he had just heard when his opponent was talking about migration. “I don’t think he even knows it himself,” he added.
The split screen of the CNN broadcast did not help the image of a president whose mental abilities voters have doubts about due to his advanced age. And the format, without an audience, which gave the face-to-face an air somewhere between unreal and ascetic, did not work in his favour either.
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The cable television network, paradoxically following the wishes of the Biden campaign, tried so hard to sanitize the conversation between the two with a lot of rules that in the end there was a television product without insults beyond the personal disqualifications that both exchanged. , but also too bland, with two presenters, dressed theatrically in white (Dana Bash) and black (Jake Tapper), who were infected by the lack of tension of the conversation they were moderating.
No handshake
The producers had placed the two lecterns closer than ever to each other, but the candidates preferred not to shake hands. And while Biden cast incredulous glances at Trump, the latter avoided eye contact with his opponent for almost the entire debate with calculated disdain.
Another of the rules imposed by the organizers of the event was that there were two breaks and that the speakers did not have notes or have conversations with their assistants. These pauses were, as television rules dictate, to allow the entry of advertisements, although some commentators could not help but call them “bathroom breaks,” taking into account that the combined ages of the two candidates add up to as many years as two-thirds of the history of the American republic.
Associated Press/LaPresse (APN)
By the time the first of those pauses came, analysts had already begun calling what was happening with Biden by its proper name (“painful to contemplate,” he titled Washington Post)And on the conservative Fox News, CNN’s arch-enemy network – which retransmitted the signal provided by CNN despite the fact that they must have disliked focusing on each and every one of the logos that populated the stage – they were already starting to celebrate the victory of their candidate. Once the face-to-face was over, the unthinkable happened: the labels of both networks, which normally tell diametrically opposed stories based on the same reality, displayed a similar message and even a shared noun: “panic.”
It wasn’t just them: by the time the first polls came in (CNN’s poll gave Trump a victory with 67% of those surveyed), “panic” had already become the most repeated word of the night to describe the stupor into which the Democrats were plunged after seeing Biden’s performance.
Vice President Kamala Harris, first in line for presidential succession, gave an interview at the stroke of midnight in which she said that anyone has a bad night. But it was too late, and many in his party already dared to transgress the taboo and ask for the replacement of their captain due to injury before it was impossible to turn around a match that, just over four months before the elections, almost everyone (also most polls in the decisive states) give it up as lost.
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