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By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
‘Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell incensèd points
Of mighty opposites. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2
The Time: “The debate will start at 9 p.m. EDT Tuesday and is expected to last 90 minutes.”
The Place: “The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia will take center stage in the race for the White House Tuesday as it hosts the first and only scheduled presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.” And how ridiculous that there’s only one debate. No doubt the loser will want a rematch, but the winner will refuse to grant one.[1]
The Rules: “ABC’s rules, first shared with the campaigns last month, largely mirror the format of CNN’s presidential debate in June between Trump and President Joe Biden, during which the candidates’ microphones were muted as their opponent spoke. It was a rule that the Biden campaign had insisted on but something the Harris campaign had sought to change after she became a presidential candidate. The network’s rules also state that there will be no audience, the candidates will not be permitted to have written notes, no staff can visit them during the two commercial breaks and the candidates cannot ask questions of one another.” And: “ABC said only the moderators will be permitted to ask questions. Each candidate will be allotted two minutes to answer each question with a two-minute rebuttal, plus an additional minute for a follow-up, clarification or response.” Funny how the mike rule now favors Trump, even though the Biden camp insisted on it.
Interestingly, both candidates have a similar weakness: Kamala, for word salad (honestly, “Exhausted about the division” isn’t English), and Trump, for what I call “jazzy riffing” (and what some specialists, perhaps tendentiously, call “tangentiality“). Trump’s riffing, however, has staying power; he can keep it up for ninety minutes, easily. About Kamala’s staying power, I’m not so sure.
Before the Biden vs. Trump debate, I wrote:
What I will be watching for — besides, I admit it, waiting for Biden to slip a cog or an “Oh, the humanity!” moment from Trump, plus both debaters duking it out, blow-by-blow, ZOMG the spectacle!! — will be how the candidates appeal, or have been managed or chivvied into appealing, to the small numbers of persuadable voters in the swing states (and from their appeals, perhaps to reverse engineer the future course of the race). For some reason, I’ve been watching Moneyball clips lately; this is an especially good one: “People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs.” Those small numbers of persuadable voters are the runs.
Of course, Biden actually did slip a cog, majorly, so the debate seemed rather pointless after that, and I never saw what I said I would watch for. Perhaps this time!
However, if I had to imagine what one might call a decisive moment — Trump having achieved two, one with Clinton, and one with Biden, knocking the latter out of the race — I can see two possibilities.
First, Kamala. If Kamala comes out with a superbly crafted and confidently delivered statement for the prosecution, using the word “felon” a lot, Trump would need to knock it down, hard (the recent revelation that Bragg’s PR dude thinks that Bragg’s case was a crock should help here. Fani’s, too). She’ll need some assistance from the moderators to do this early, however.
Second, Trump. As we know, Trump has a genius for sensing weakness in others. He has yet to display this with Kamala. My pet theory of that case: Trump spokesperson Alvarez recently said that “the American people know ‘who Trump is,’ but ‘what we don’t know is Kamala Harris,” but I would take that further: The case can be made that Kamala doesn’t know who she is. It’s great to be Indian, Black, and a mixed-race person of color. What’s not great is to shift, chameleon-like, from the first, to the second, to the third, depending on the campaign. There’s also Kamala’s shifts on policy from 2019 to today. Surely Medicare for All and fracking are big enough issues that one might take a considered stand upon them that lasted more than three years? And then there’s the plagiarism issue: If Kamala really knows what she stands for, why on earth plagiarize Biden’s platform? And then there’s the oh-so-authentic collard greens and spices thing. What’s up with that? I don’t know how to reduce that to a debate zinger, but if I had to pick Kamala’s weakness, that’s what it would be.
Oh, and volatility is the central feature of this election, despite all efforts to keep things stable. It follows that the debate will be volatile, as the last one was.
P.S. I wonder if Melania releasing a clip on the attempt to assassinate Trump will be a topic in the debate. That should be interesting!
NOTES
[1] More on the National Constitution Center from WikiPedia:
The National Constitution Center is a non-profit institution that is devoted to the study of the Constitution of the United States. Located at the Independence Mall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the center is an interactive museum which serves as a national town hall, hosting government leaders, journalists, scholars, and celebrities who engage in public discussions, including Constitution-related events and presidential debates.
The groundbreaking ceremony was held on September 17, 2000, the 213th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution.
Frankly, I find the whole notion a little unsettling. If the Constitution were truly a living document, would there be a museum devoted to it? My sense of unease is reinforced by another detail:
Prior to its closure in December 2019, the Newseum, a journalism-themed museum in Washington D.C., had featured a four-story-tall stone panel inscribed with the text of the First Amendment as part of its exterior design. The Freedom Forum, a nonprofit organization that created the museum, announced in March 2021 that the panel would be dismantled and donated to the National Constitution Center for display in its second-floor atrium.
So the First Amendment was the first one to go….