The Big Faceoff!

Some of my impressions

I wasn’t going to watch the debate. I hate political debates. They’re not really debates, where candidates discuss the merits of their positions on issues. It’s no longer Kennedy/Nixon, much less Lincoln/Douglas. Over the years presidential debates have degenerated into cheap reality television show productions, where each candidate attempts to generate the most memorable sound bites. I didn’t watch the Biden/Trump debate, and I don’t think I missed anything worth watching. Harris/Trump? I figured I’d catch the lowlights the next day. But, with the encouragement of my wife, Rita, I watched it. I told myself I would stay long enough to see how the candidates greeted each other and then switch to something else once it got boring.

But something weird happened—it never got boring! It turned out to be the most entertaining piece of reality TV I’ve ever seen.

It began with the entrance of the candidates. Trump shambled in slowly, slouching a bit, as if he wasn’t sure where he was supposed to go. Harris entered the room briskly. She hesitated for a split second and then made a beeline for Trump, who seemed startled at her rapid approach. Maybe he thought she was going to pull a shiv. Instead, she smiled and extended her hand, daring him to take it. He looked at her hand long enough to verify that she was unarmed before giving it one of his patented pull-them-in muscle clasps that he uses to establish dominance. But it seemed half-hearted, and she wasn’t fazed. She kept smiling, said something along the lines of “Have a good debate,” and walked purposefully to her podium.

For all intents and purposes, Harris won the debate right then and there. It wasn’t that she pitched a perfect game, but she took the lead in the top of the first and never relinquished it.

As for the debate itself, quite frankly neither of them impressed me with their rhetoric. There were no “You are no Jack Kennedy” home-run moments. But where Harris fouled a few pitches weakly into the dirt, it was Trump who had the most swings and misses, and he took a number of strike threes right down the middle.

“They’re eating the dogs!” was an obvious swing-and-a-miss, and the follow-up “I’ve seen people on television” was strike three.

Trump struck out over and over again (“He [Biden] hates her,” “She [Harris] hates Israel,” “You’re going to have to figure that out, Abdul”) and while the “eating dogs” whiff is the one most people are still talking about, for me the most egregious and memorable strikeouts were:

• (Re: January 6) “I had nothing to do with that other than they asked me to make a speech.”

• (Re: Admitting that he lost the 2020 election by a whisker) “I said that sarcastically.”

• (Re: Whether he has a healthcare plan) “I have concepts of a plan. I'm not president right now.”

Never has a candidate for president sounded more like a school kid telling the teacher that the dog ate his homework than Trump did with those three incredibly lame attempts to wriggle out of taking responsibility for his own actions.

As for Harris, she was certainly vulnerable. She was set up to be knocked down on the economy, Israel/Gaza, and illegal immigration. (Yes, I realize that I’m mixing my metaphors in this paragraph, switching from baseball to boxing. Sorry, couldn’t be helped.) But Trump was unable to take advantage. His attacks were wild, chaotic, and, in the case of immigration, completely unhinged. All Harris had to do was smile tolerantly and let Trump throw his undisciplined punches (Trump spoke for 43 minutes; Harris for 37.5). That was clearly her strategy going in, and it proved to be effective. It was her version of rope-a-dope: let Trump punch himself out. And Trump obligingly fell right into it. No wonder he looked so tired when it was all over.

But forget what either of them said. The real fight was with the reaction shots when the opponent was speaking, and it was here that Harris ran away with the debate. While Trump was speaking, Harris looked on with bemused toleration, a disbelieving expression on her face, like a mother listening to her ten-year-old daughter explaining why she should be allowed to get her ears pierced.

Trump, on the other hand, never made eye contact with Harris after the opening handshake. He never even looked her way. It was as if he found her nearness to him offensive, or threatening. He listened, eyes sometimes darting back and forth, pursing his lips as if he were holding in his teeth, sweat gleaming over his makeup (darker than Harris’s), looking old, angry, and increasingly tired as the debate wore on.

After the debate, Trump declared that he won, but he’s been acting as if he lost. He declared that the moderators were biased against him, because they fact-checked his most obvious lies. He implied that Harris knew the questions in advance. (Didn’t we all?) He stated that he wouldn’t debate Harris again since he had beat her so badly, yet I strongly suspect he’d agree to another debate with Biden tomorrow if anyone were interested in setting one up.

I don’t know if the Big Debate actually changed anyone’s mind about which of the candidates to vote for. I don’t believe that more than a relative handful of people were truly undecided about the candidates going in. But it had an unexpected impact when it inspired Taylor Swift to announce she was going to vote for Harris/Waltz. She didn’t actually endorse the ticket, but she encouraged her legions of fans to register and to vote for the candidate of their choice. Within twelve hours, more than 300,000 new young voters registered.

And they say the President of the United States is the most powerful figure in the country. Hmm. Maybe Swift should have moderated the debate.