The thing that summed up last night’s presidential debate more than anything else for me was not from either of the two men who actually participated in the debate. No, it came from comedian Stephen Colbert, who joked about it in his live show immediately after the debate, announcing in his best boxing announcer’s voice:
“Let’s get ready to watch democracy CRUMB – BLE!”
Yup. That pretty much is what it feels like we are watching, too. If you can’t laugh, you would need to cry. Or despair.
Allow me to say right up front that I did not exactly have high expectations for the presidential debate last night. Yet somehow, even with my expectations being set quite low, the debate proved to disappoint my quite modest expectations for them.
Like most people, after watching it, I felt a mixture of things. Frustration. Anger. Confusion. Desperation for the state of the country.
This is a nation of over 330 million people, and many of them are incredibly bright, thoughtful, capable people. And then you have these two old men, trading barbs and trying to talk over one another, particularly Trump, who has that legendary big mouth of his. Am I the only one who is asking my self if this is the best leadership that the country can look forward to? I mean, really, what the hell was that, anyway? It was pathetic. Hard to follow, because the moderator, Chris Wallace of FOX News, lost control almost from the first. He tried to sound like he had authority, but it was so obvious that he lacked any real authority to rein in either of the two men when they got out of line. Forget about fact-checking, for that matter.
Some of what passed for “highlights?”
Well, once again, Trump hesitated to the point of refusal when asked directly by both Wallace and Biden to condemn white supremacy.
Shocker, huh?
Some right-wing pundits have tried to defend him since, suggesting that he has condemned white supremacy in the past. He did not do it clearly in this debate, even when both Wallace and Biden were pressing him to do it, he declined, and railed against Antifa instead. When asked why, his supporters found some lame excuses, but the bottom line seems clear: he refuses to condemn white supremacists because they are a strong part of his base of support, and doing so might compromise some of those crucial votes that he needs to have a hope of winning. It is not difficult to figure out, if you have an ounce of honesty and integrity. And Trump's willingness to continually bow down to white supremacist groups who see in him a champion of their cause.
Biden lost his cool at times, although you have to admit that there is little way that any reasonably intelligent and serious person could have done otherwise. At one point, Biden told Trump to shut up. At another, he suggested that Trump was a clown. While I do not disagree with that, it is nevertheless sad to see just how horribly the quality of our national debate has declined. It felt at times like we were not watching two grown men, two senior citizens, debating the most important issues of the day, as much as we watched two children arguing, quite literally.
It was hard to understand what either man was saying, mostly because Trump almost never makes sense, and he tried to drown out anything that Biden had to say with his big mouth.
Just awful. And I feel that it was symbolic of where the country is right now, as well.
By now, I can hardly claim to be shocked. After all, we have now had four years of this garbage. But it was very depressing, and sobering.
The question, though, is whether or not enough Americans got that same sense in order to make a very necessary change come November.
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