The presidency is powerful—entirely too powerful. Through mission creep, popular acclaim, and abandonment of responsibility by the legislative branch, the nation’s chief executive has gained near-unilateral authority to wage war and is rapidly acquiring similarly monarchical say over domestic policy. But the office is still elected. The American people are entitled to job interviews with hopeful candidates. Unfortunately, presidential “debates” barely fill that role, least of all the choreographed kabuki meet-ups between Joe Biden and Donald Trump scheduled for this summer.
“Trump feeds off the crowd, they give him life,” an anonymous Biden adviser told Politico about the exclusion of audiences from the events. “We wanted to take that away.”
Biden’s people are afraid that speaking in front of living, breathing humans plays to the presumed Republican candidate’s strengths (and, conversely, to Biden’s weaknesses), so they want it off the table. But that’s only one constraint placed on the gatherings planned for June 27 and September 10, specified by the Biden campaign and agreed to by Trump’s camp. The debates will bypass the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates and be hosted by CNN (June) and ABC News (September). They’ll exclude other presidential candidates. And the meetups will follow kindergarten rules, with the participants allowed to speak only in turn while the other candidate’s microphone is off.
This year’s strange, rule-bound “debates” are the inevitable culmination of a long process of making the meetups as easy as possible for Democratic and Republican standard-bearers. The Commission on Presidential Debates, which is so aggrieved to have been sidelined, was itself created by the major parties to craft situations friendly to their candidates after independent organizations, such as the League of Women Voters, refused to oblige.
Hellbound and Down 