Ed. Note: Nicole Lafond will be back to helming Where Things Stand soon.
Next week, the 2024 presidential campaign will hit one of its predictable low points. The two major party nominees will meet in a nationally televised debate — and everything we know from watching these two men in public life for the last 40-50 years and our lived experience of their presidencies for the past nearly eight years will be thrown out window.
Instead, we’ll get theater criticism divorced from politics or policy. We’ll watch as their age and cognitive abilities are assessed. We’ll have gaffe counters and word clouds and assorted other gimmicks to try to imbue the event with meaning and significance after the substance has been stripped away. Whose one-liners and quips will win the day?
You can blame the demands and conventions of TV broadcasts, or the debate moderators, or the “low information” voters the debates seek to reach. You can blame the press corps for over-investing in these packaged events, duplicating for their readers and viewers the same basic coverage that every other outlet is providing. You can blame partisans who pin their energy and enthusiasm for their candidate on something as fickle as a debate.
None of what I’m describing was any less true in 2020 or 2016 or 2008 or 2000. But it comes around again in 2024 with a particularly jarring level of discordance. We know so much about each candidate. No one is really in an information vacuum. The terms of the debate are so vastly different not just from past years but between the candidates themselves. This isn’t about Social Security lock boxes or tax cuts or health care policy.
It’s about the existential questions facing democracy, and I’m not sure there’s any way for a debate to capture that. Ponder, for instance, the normal kind of gotcha questions that moderators will pepper a candidate with. Do you promise to veto a nationwide abortion ban? Will you let the Trump tax cuts expire? Will you cede Ukraine to Russia? Fair questions applicable to the current moment, but they don’t come close to capturing the dynamic of this race.
Will you promise to abide by the results of the election or will you unleash violence against election workers to try to tilt the election your way? If you win in 2024, will you relinquish office at the end of your second term in accordance with the Constitution? These are legit questions, but they’re not likely to be asked, and, frankly, even if they are, I’m not sure the world’s best moderator can pivot from the “Trump, let’s explore the extent of your authoritarianism” questions to the more normal policy-specific questions for Biden without the whole artificial edifice constructed for the debate tumbling down — or at least giving the moderator a migraine.
All of which is to say that this year’s debates, more than in any other cycle,