Everything in the United States is ultimately “historic” and “unprecedented.” It is the sign of a time of worn-out adjectives, yes, but this time it has some truth. The debate that this Thursday will mercilessly pit Joe Biden and Donald Trump against each other, in Atlanta and for CNN, is the first between two such elderly rivals (81 and 78 years old) whose abilities are in question; the first between two former presidents; and the first also to be held so soon, just over four months before the elections, when both candidates are not yet officially candidates (that moment will come with the conventions, in July and August).
Traditionally, these face-to-face meetings are held a few weeks before the polls, but this time they have accelerated the calendar at Biden’s request, because voting by mail in advance has never been as important as it is now. The second round of this confrontation will be on September 10. The president’s confidence is that such an early debate will serve to dispel doubts about his lucidity, which many distrust, and to remind voters of Trump’s true personality. If everything goes as Biden hopes, it could be crucial for his re-election campaign. If not, he will still have months to redress the disaster.
The history of presidential face-to-face meetings in the United States is also the history of television in this country. The first that marked an era was also the first that was not exclusively radio and the first of the triad of debates that are universally accepted that determined the result of the polls. In 1960, it helped Kennedy greatly to gain the ability to sneak his image as a promising young man into the living rooms of Americans.
In front of him was Richard Nixon, Republican candidate and two-time vice president. Her lack of understanding of the language of the new medium (as well as her choice of suit color and his refusal to wear makeup) worked against him in the first of the four debates. He learned his lesson, but it was too late: the contrast between their styles tipped the balance on the Democratic side.
There were no more debates until 1976, the year in which, once again, the confrontation between the two candidates was decisive. On one side was Republican President Gerald Ford, given the thankless task of rebuilding a country’s broken trust after Nixon’s resignation two years earlier, beset by the Watergate scandal. Opposite him was Jimmy Carter, who was able to expose his opponent when he made her say that the Soviet Union did not exercise its domination over the republics of Eastern Europe. The skid cost Ford dearly among voters in swing states in the Midwest, with a high percentage of Poles and Czechs.
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From executioner to victim
Four years later, the executioner Carter became the victim of his opponent: the old (and mediocre) actor Ronald Reagan offered one of his best performances in his face to face with the president, who was running for re-election. Reagan’s telegenicity was enough to reassure voters, especially women, who were suspicious of his bellicose profile. The candidate used the family trick to convince viewers otherwise: “I have witnessed four wars throughout my life,” he said. “I have kids. I have a grandson. “I don’t want to watch another generation of young Americans bleed to death on the beaches of the Pacific, in the rice paddies and jungles of Asia, or on the bloody, mud-filled battlefields of Europe.”
From those three inaugural confrontations, candidates, advisors and also voters took note and none of the debates that followed were so decisive. They had their moments, yes. There is the joke about his age with which Reagan made even his opponent, Walter Mondale, laugh in 1984, the coldness with which Michael Dukakis responded in 1988 to a question about the death penalty in the hypothetical case of rape and murder. of his wife, George Bush Sr. looking at the clock and losing his thread in 1992 or the loud sighs of impatience of Al Gore, who would end up losing in 2000 by a handful of votes against Bush Jr.
Democratic supporters and strategists, who will inevitably live with their hearts in their fists during the 90 minutes that the Biden-Trump debate without an audience is scheduled to last this Thursday, trust with everything that the precedents that matter will be the face-to-face ones between the two. 2020, when the current president prevailed over an angry Trump and even managed to stop his tendency to interrupt with a “Will you shut up, man?”
On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton, “the only person who has debated both” — in 2016, with Trump, who promised in a face-to-face that he would imprison her upon reaching the White House, and eight years earlier, in her party’s primaries, with Biden — published an opinion piece in The New York Times in which he gave viewers three pieces of advice for approaching the debate: to pay attention to how the candidates talk about people and not just their policies (especially on the crucial issue of abortion); to try to see “beyond the bragging” (especially when it comes to talking about the economy); and to think about what is really at stake in this election, a dilemma between “chaos” and “the real problem” [de Trump y su reciente condena por 34 delitos graves]” and “the competition [de Biden]”, whom the former Secretary of State considers “a wise and decent man.”
Clinton also begged that theater not be put before politics, because “it is about electing the best president and not the best actor.” Although that plea, in a culture like the United States and taking into account the history of presidential debates, more subject to the rules of street fighting than to those of the noble art of rhetoric, it seems too much to ask.
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