CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--With all due respect to the learned statisticians and pollsters, the simple question of who finished the debate ahead on points – who educated the voters more on issues of federal reserve policy or steel tariffs -- isn’t very important.
This wasn’t the high school debate club, where the object is to win a ribbon. The actual object is to win the election.
Historians illustrate this truism by pointing out that when Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy debated, a person listening on the radio would have figured Nixon as the winner. But television viewers got a different message: Nixon continued to look awkward and geeky. Kennedy looked princely.
It's not just what you say in the debate, it’s how you present who you are.
And it’s not just how you look, although that is an influence. It’s the sum total of how you behave, what you say, and your facial expressions. And depending on how good you are at presenting yourself – acting, to put it bluntly -- you will connect with the audience and they with you. And when you know that you are going into battle, the stress goes up another notch.
When Joe Biden walked onto that stage with Donald Trump, he could reasonably anticipate that Trump would try to take him down a peg or two, and that Trump might even get a little insulting. That’s the Trump record.
How to deal with Trump? We were watching a man going to the mat for his future presidency and for his nation. How would he fight that battle? Biden had a number of possible strategies available to him.
That’s mainly what this particular discussion is about. My view is that Biden performed masterfully in presenting himself to the American people while fending off the Trump onslaught. There was a lot of tactical thinking that Biden had to do from one moment to the next. Most of the time it didn’t show itself, but just like a baseball pitcher making a few pickoff throws to first base, there is a lot going on even in the small intervals and micro-battles.
The opening: As everyone understands, there is only a short period of time to make that critical first impression. Biden was going in having been smeared as doddering and senile by the Trump forces. People would be looking for any trace of hesitation, stuttering, or bad wording.
It didn’t take long to figure out that Trump was going to be a total jerk. He was given the ultimate softball question to start the show, and he actually did alright. But even when it came to Biden’s first response, barely 3 minutes into the debate, Trump started heckling and interrupting. It was as though he had decided to play himself as a talk radio host instead of as the president.
So let’s consider the choice of tactics that Biden had available to him, and the decisions he made, starting in his first response. Biden let Trump get away with the interrupting for a short while. This was a critical moment and the correct decision -- somebody who wasn’t a dyed-in-the-wool Trumpite would find the president’s behavior irritating. (I certainly did.)
It was a momentary win for Biden because it established the dueling personas we were going to experience for the rest of the event. Biden was getting the presumption of innocence while Trump was already being the bad guy. Think of it like this – Trump didn’t do anything at all during the entire debate to make himself likeable to the viewers. It wouldn’t matter with his supporters, but it does matter with those few who are not yet solid in their decisions. And it is critically important that Biden solidified his image with those who don’t like Trump but were not yet strongly supportive of him.
Notice that the moderator held off from interrupting Trump’s interruptions during that same few minutes at the beginning.
That moderator, Chris Wallace, has been either pitied or criticized for being caught in the middle, but I thought at the time that Wallace was intentionally giving Trump a little rope. It certainly worked, in that Trump took on amplitude and velocity, and made interrupting Biden into his main debating tactic.
Wallace has been taken to task for losing control, starting in those first five minutes. But whether or not Wallace had intent, the image of Trump as the schoolyard bully was established early on. So, I will give Chris Wallace a few points for allowing Trump to paint himself in an unfriendly light.
Round 1 to Biden.
But there is risk in letting the bullying go on for very long. If you never resist, you paint yourself as somebody who is weak, somebody who should not be chosen to deal with Russia or Iran. Pretty much all of us viewers already knew Trump the bully, and for Biden to put up with the abusive treatment for very long would have begun to be an equally severe error. At some point -- and you don’t have too very long -- you have to fight back.
And how you fight back is critically important. What did Joe do?
He did a lot of smiling, which contrasted with Trump’s generally belligerent expression. Biden mostly kept himself under control, going only so far as to allow himself to sound exasperated from time to time. It’s actually those moments, for example the time where he wondered out loud whether anybody could make this clown shut up, that were repeated again and again on news programs and in internet discussions.
I think that what Biden did took some acting skill, but more than that, it required an enormous level of self-control.
At the time, I worried a bit about all those Biden smiles, because – it was a while back, but you may remember -- Al Gore was taken to task for his repeated sighs in his debate with George W. Bush. You don’t want to look conceited. Gore lost points with the viewers for the attitude he was conveying. Apparently, Biden has not been blamed.
Let me repeat one point that I suggested earlier: It didn’t really matter all that much what the substance of the opposing remarks were. Trump actually got the best of Biden on the opening question because legally, he and the senate do have the right to appoint a Supreme Court justice in the event of a vacancy. But neither that answer nor Biden’s response were really important at this particular moment. It only mattered how the two were perceived deep down by us viewers.
From that opening number, we learned that Trump was going to break the rule about giving your opponent his two uninterrupted minutes, and we learned that Biden was at least going to try to act like a grown up.
Biden did try to respond with his own interruptions eventually, but I suspect that for most, it was perceived as his rightful form of defense.
This was the critical Round 2 of the match, where Biden had to show that he was just as tough, but more clear headed, than his opponent. I think that Biden won narrowly on this phase. The problem for Biden, as for the viewers, was that this process of not being steamrollered often resulted in both candidates and the moderator all talking over each other at the same time. Had Biden found a way to communicate his quandary to the audience – perhaps by raising a hand or something – he would have picked up a little more credit in the battle of the dueling images.
Taking it up a notch and then another
And then Biden took it up a notch. He used the L word – liar – something that many in the media have avoided. He made it clear that he wasn’t going to match every Trump lie with a detailed rebuttal. This is one way to handle the “Gish gallup” that we have discussed previously, i.e.: when your opponent strings together one lie after another almost as fast as he can talk, and there is no way available to confound the lies when it is your turn.
And at some point, Biden got downright caustic. I think it was a mistake to use the word clown more than once, but Biden made sure to remark that Trump is the worst president in our nation’s history. And by the end, it was clear that there is no love lost between these two, that Biden holds Trump in contempt, and even the superficialities of acting like a gentleman had gone by the wayside.
My reaction as the debate went into its final minutes was this: “Biden is kind of being a dick here. Not as much as Trump by a longshot, but it’s there.”
And only later did it occur to me: By being a dick – that is to say, acting a little bit authoritarian, contemptuous, snide – Biden was communicating to Trump’s followers that he is capable of replacing their leader with somebody else who is also a leader. It’s not the leader that Democrats would choose, but it is the leader that the Trump followers have chosen.
And whether they like it or not, Trump followers are likely to lose one leader in the next few months. Whether they adopt Biden as the guy who out-toughed Trump is another question, but the option is available to them, and this, in and of itself, may lessen any post-election turmoil.
I have no idea whether Biden acted this way through some carefully thought-through plan, or instead just went on instinct, but it might have been the right way to go. The hard right has learned that they are not facing a Hillary Clinton presidency, and I think they learned that Trump’s prepared line (that Pelosi and Schumer have Biden wrapped around their fingers) is not true.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
