Donald Trump and Joe Biden are due to debate each other three times before the November 3 election. But a lot of people suspect it won’t happen because, as many a headline puts it, Biden is hidin’.
The televised contests, watched by tens of millions, would be the first real electoral test for the 77-year-old former vice president who has used the cover of the pandemic to remain holed up in his basement for four months.
Anyone who has seen him up close over the past six months knows he suffers from some sort of cognitive deficit, so it’s a test many Democrats are loath to risk.
Now that Biden is beating Trump in the polls they’re hoping to cart him over the finish line before voters notice something is amiss.
To that end, Biden allies have been floating the idea that he should ditch the debates. Presidential debates have been a fixture of every election for 50 years, yet this outlandish idea is being normalised in the media.
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The narrative has formed, and alibis crafted.
“Let’s scrap the Presidential debates,” Elizabeth Drew wrote in the New York Times on Monday. “And not for health reasons.”
And not “out of any concern that Donald Trump will prevail over Joe Biden”.
She is just concerned that debates play an “out-size role in campaigns”.
Pull the other one.
Last week, former Clinton operative Joe Lockhart advised Biden, in an article for CNN: “Whatever you do, don’t debate Trump.
“It’s a fool’s errand to enter the ring with someone who can’t follow the rules or the truth.”
Right.
Last month it was New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a Trump hater and frequent dispenser of unsolicited advice to Democrats: “Biden Should Not Debate Trump Unless.”
“I worry about Joe Biden debating Donald Trump,” Friedman wrote.
“That is not a good way for Biden to reintroduce himself to the American people.”
Debates would give Trump, a cage fighter who wiped the floor with Hillary Clinton in 2016, an “unfair advantage”.
But if Biden can’t handle a debate how can he run the country?
Journalists used to want as much scrutiny as possible of political candidates.
But we all know why lefties don’t want Biden to debate Trump. His brain is not working, and he is not match fit.
The biggest challenges he’s faced since March are Zoom events where he reads from a teleprompter and a couple of recent stage-managed events down the road from his home, after which he takes a four or five softball questions from pre-vetted journalists.
Trump, on the other hand, is well practised in the art of verbal jousting, having to do combat with a hostile Washington press corps almost every day.
Former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe reportedly told a group of Democrats in June that Biden should keep hiding because it’s working in the polls. “He’s fine in the basement,” he said.
