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The people who set Biden up to debate went to war with the president and the media they had. Yet they fell into the same traps of the past.
Most first-term presidents lose the first debate of their re-election campaigns, and they lose it in largely the same way. They have spent nearly four years building a record, and they want to run on it. So they lay out a blur of information about what they’ve done. Some presidents trip over the details. Others just bore people with them. Still others act like they’re offended that the president of these United States could be challenged on these points at all.
Biden slammed into all three of these obstacles, while being 81 years old and rather feeble. But those who prepared Biden for a debate they sought and whose terms they dictated knew who they were dealing with. They knew the state of the media, and its role in the century-long transformation of American politics into theater criticism. And if they spent ten seconds on the history of these debates—heck, if they even watched the last Biden-Trump debates, which Biden won—they’d know that an overprepared, detail-heavy presentation wasn’t going to work.
If you want to get mad at “the Democratic Party,” whoever you conceive of that being, for rolling this guy out there and failing to convince him to stand down, OK. But be specific. The people who spent a week with Biden at Camp David had a specific duty, which they failed utterly to accomplish.
You can start with Biden’s first two answers, which sent Democrats to their phones to text each other in despair. Biden was clearly fed way too many figures and had way too many points to hit on his script for someone with his difficulties in communicating.
Asked about the economy, he started off saying that COVID put the country in a state of collapse. He had to check off 15 percent unemployment under Trump (in fairness, that was the peak for only one month at the outset of lockdowns), and then 15 million new jobs under him, and then 800,000 manufacturing jobs. He got two out of three, actually saying, “We created 15,000 jobs.” He then pivoted to feeling Americans’ pain over high prices. He then promised two million new housing units to lower prices, but he was also told to mention corporate greed as a cause of the inflation problem. Then there was a pivot back to his record, about lowering the cost of insulin and the out-of-pocket cap on all drugs for seniors. Both of these had figures attached, both of which he got wrong. He said he brought insulin down to $15 a shot; it’s $35 a month. He said the cap on out-of-pocket costs starting next year would be $200; it’s $2,000. (Biden corrected these numbers when he went back over most of these same points in his closing statement. This is how you know it was a deliberate, prepared sequence.)
The delivery was poor and the errors regrettable. But if Biden nailed every word of this, it would be bad, a meandering journey jumbling up Trump’s record, Biden’s record, and some plans for the future. Filling Biden’s head with all of these details and this precise sequencing created the slipups. It was clearly calibrated by committee, an attempt to thread the needle of boasting, empathy, and vision in a way that did none of it.
On the second full question, which was about the national debt, of all things—a throwback to the fiscal scolds who dominated the 2016 debates—Biden tried to fit in Trump’s contribution to the debt over his term, the $2 trillion Trump tax cut, the fact that a thousand billionaires in America (Biden said trillionaires first) pay 8.2 percent in taxes, how much money would be raised if they paid “24 percent or 25 percent, either one of those numbers,” and then what could be done with that money, which included deficit reduction, child care, elder care, and strengthening the health care system. This was the answer with the ghastly ending where Biden talked himself out and then landed on “we finally beat Medicare,” by which he meant that his administration beat Big Pharma by allowing negotiation of prescription drugs within Medicare.
Biden’s performance was clearly calibrated by committee, an attempt to thread the needle of boasting, empathy, and vision in a way that did none of it.
You can almost see the mental scrolling through the briefing book in this answer, trying to fit in all of these policy concepts. On their own, each one is reasonable to bring up in a political debate: Running up debt is unpopular (if irrelevant), tax increases on the wealthy are popular, and using that money to lower cost burdens on families is popular, particularly in health care. But rehearsed passages with lots of figures don’t play to the strengths of this president, and more important, don’t play to the strengths of presidential debates.
By contrast, Donald Trump walked out there, called Biden the worst president in history, brought almost everything back to his depiction of a lawless border, said it over and over again with conviction, refused to answer any question and returned to his two points, and lied his ass off. It was terrible. But if “politics is television with the sound off,” as Karl Rove once said, it was no contest.
This was over in the first ten minutes. Biden actually improved a bit after that, but the narrative was set. He improved by throwing away the script and showing a little emotion. But who put that script into Biden’s head in the first place? His debate preppers. And let’s name names here: Ron Klain, Anita Dunn, Ben LaBolt, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Cedric Richmond, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Quentin Fulks, Michael Tyler, and Rob Flaherty.
They were the ones who thought you could bring a white paper to a knife fight, to fight a con man with Tracy Flick. They were the ones who thought voters really wanted to hear about the 8.2 percent effective tax rate on the ultra-wealthy and the net revenue that will be earned over the ten-year budget window by reinstating an alternative minimum tax.
It pains me to write these words. I’m a policy journalist. I despair at the devolution of how politics is covered in this country. In this case, comparing what these two candidates have done with the executive branch while president, a unique opportunity unavailable since 1892 (or I suppose since 1912, but the two former or current presidents lost that time), would be my preferred line of questioning.
But you can’t turn the tide of decades of “Great Communicator” perceptions of the presidency in one night. The people who set Biden up to debate went to war with the president and the media they had. Yet they fell into the same traps of the past, thinking a nuts-and-bolts flurry of numbers would dazzle the public. And they thought that while knowing the opponent would be Donald Trump!
As someone losing the election, you cannot sort of lose sight of the front-runner while trying to present a bunch of laundry lists. There was no sense of the fact that the malefactors of great wealth are coalescing around Trump’s campaign. Biden didn’t use the climate section to mention that Trump asked Big Oil for a billion dollars in donations. He didn’t rebut Hunter Biden with Jared Kushner’s Saudi-funded investment vehicle. He didn’t use the Social Security section to point out that there were Social Security cuts in every one of Trump’s budgets. He didn’t use the immigration section to say that Trump forced Republicans to walk away from a bipartisan bill they negotiated because he wants a campaign issue at the border rather than a solution. (The second time this came up, he sort of said this, but in the middle of a long digression about fentanyl machines, which diminished the message.)
There were scattered efforts to personify Trump as an election denier and a threat to democracy. Maybe Biden’s best moment was when he framed Trump as a “whiner” who couldn’t fathom having ever lost anything. But little was put into the ways Trump’s corruption, and down-the-line conservatism, created bad outcomes for people, and how that would continue if he were elected again. Few contrasts were actually created.
By the way, those incumbents above who lost their first debate—Reagan, Clinton, Bush II, Obama? They all won re-election. John Fetterman won election to the Senate after an even more disastrous debate two years ago. But they were also all ahead going into the debate. Ford, Carter, Bush I, and Trump were not when they lost the debate, and the election.
Biden’s press handlers have pretty much bottled him up since he took the oath of office. He’s done few interviews. Impromptu settings were strictly avoided. How did they think he was going to manage a one-week cram session after having the burden of messaging lifted from him for years? This was an unforgivable mistake for a political shop that has been blind to and insulated from their own failures.
It is perhaps personally cathartic to put this all on Biden and his stubborn determination. But presidents don’t get to where they are alone. Many people are by their side, paid well (and set up for life afterward) to put them in a position to succeed. After seeing this debacle, why would anyone think those handlers, or the ones who couldn’t beat them out to get into the White House, would be able to pull off a four-month sprint presidential campaign with a substitute candidate, or the automatically messy process it would take to get there?
