Debating Themselves
Terry H. Schwadron
Sept. 3, 2024
At this rate, next week’s presidential debate could feature Donald Trump debating himself over abortion rights, respect for the military, support for legalized marijuana use in Florida, and any number of issues that pair himself with Law & Order and crime.
For that matter, Kamala Harris could ask herself about her positions about fracking.
What has stood out as the personal attacks sharpen and the elbowing gets more fractious is just how dumb the candidates must think we are not to recognize a good pander when we hear it.
Does Trump really think that he can appeal as a rational voice for women’s reproductive rights just to blunt the obvious advantage that Harris and Democrats have on this issue. Even his most vociferous right-wing evangelistas are attacking him for trying to pussyfoot around with the issue. Even right-leaning generals and military folks reject what Harris now calls a stunt that Trump pulled at Arlington National Cemetery as disrespectful — and apparently illegal. (As an aside, who offers a thumbs-up sign at a memorial anyway?)
There is nothing wrong with candidates who own up to a need to change their mind after hearing enough fact or even political persuasion. Why would Harris say she was sticking to her principles on climate for denouncing fracking before accepting it? It would have been better to say simply that she has learned that we need all energy sources right now until the world can adjust to solar, wind, biofuels and nuclear production.
Better yet, I’d say I know no one for whom this election is about fracking policy rather than, say, whether we have an unrestricted authoritarian as president.
Re-learning How to Listen
Two months from November — and just a few weeks for the start of voting in some states — two things seem true. First, even if we already like or hate them, the candidates will say anything to win. And second, the news media seems to have forgotten how to do much political reporting beyond constant polls and inordinate attention on these hyperbolic, next-to-meaningless word scuffles.
What happened to substantial questions about what Trump was doing while the Capitol was under attack or why he thinks that celebrating the “patriots” of the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt is not promoting more of the same this time around — to say nothing of an apparent violation of his own probation terms? Instead we’re subjected to endless talk about whether someone else posted his own campaign videos from the cemetery and how U.S. fatalities in the hurried withdrawal from Afghanistan, for which Trump made the deal with the Taliban, were Biden’s fault.
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Trump can’t instantly provide free IVF treatments even if he truly believed his own utterances this week to do so, any more than he can wave a magic tariff wand or wish away wind turbines to lower the cost of eggs. It’s nonsense and ought to be labeled as such. And Harris ought to be telling voters that if they like more housing help, they had better elect Democrats to Congress, because she can’t provide her still-ill-defined “opportunity economy” without legislation.
The desire to rewrite the last four or eight years in strictly partisan terms, as if Covid, regional invasions and wars, economic duress, increasingly hard climate effects, migration patterns and some kind of innate desire to insulate ourselves from books, news and world events is remarkable. The desire to hang all of those on a singular personification in the White House is just wrong.
The presidency is a strong position both for policy and for national persuasion. But it is not all-encompassing. Most of those events happened outside the aegis and permission of either Trump or Biden/Harris.
What is not avoidable is how we handle the effects of what befalls us, how we anticipate and prepare, how we get up after getting knocked down.
Divergent Messages
The entire Trump campaign message is that we are victims, sheep being herded and abused by leaders who take some kind of satisfaction in grinding us down. That’s the “dark” message that only a singular savior figure, as he presents himself, can change, because only Trump has the power to make the sun rise in the morning. It’s nuts.
Further, Trump shows us that anyone except Trump enthusiasts are guilty of radical thinking — he confuses opposition as either fascism or communism — heavily salted with racist, misogynistic, personal identity insults. It all flows from the mouth of a guy already convicted of 34 felonies who already is promising to double down on the scheming to undercut the vote count this year.
Whatever policy gaffes, flaws or other shortcomings in Harris, we should be able to recognize a basic understanding of what government does, what it could do, even what it should do, at least in the eyes of supporters. For Harris and Tim Walz, the theme is around teamwork, not singular heroics, and a commitment to continue to extend individual rights exactly to people who are the object of Trump’s continuing disdain.
The hoopla of setting super-high expectations for her “unscripted” answers to anticipatable questions in a single television interview was totally out of line with what we learned: Harris is an acceptably understandable candidate who is being especially careful with responses that can spawn campaign ads against her.
With all the various statements being thrown around this week, we ought to start immediately to lower expectations for what is learnable in the Sept. 10 debate. Indeed, it is likely that you can already hear the spin masters retelling the strengths of their partisan clients even before the first televised glare across the podium stage,
As I have argued, it is hard to believe that there are voters yet to persuade. From the insistence by supporters and commentators alike, the only questions worth listening to are those that pre-suppose a candidate response, and the word from the candidates are most likely to reflect what the polls in seven or so states suggest are the biggest one-line summary pleas.
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