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AMERICA GOT WHAT IT WANTED AND IT WAS TERRIBLE:
For all the people who are upset about last night’s horrible debate, they should pause and ask themselves: wasn’t that just an accurate reflection of where we are as a nation? Two septuagenarians bashing each other with bursts of bombastic bullshittery and competing whatabouts is the content you will find on Facebook and cable news every single day. To the extent people are disappointed, remind yourself: these men both have nearly 90 percent ratings with the two largest political parties in America. They both bested huge fields of candidates to get their respective roles. This is the show you asked for, and you got it.
I rewatched the 2016 debates in anticipation of this one and one of the things you discover is that even as Hillary Clinton was consistently winning on points and substance, Donald Trump was winning the key moments that stood out. Along the way, while you may remember “you’d be in jail”, this was actually a substantive series of debates - including Chris Wallace’s! - where you learned things from both candidates and heard commitments about what they’d do as president.
This was not the case last night. From just a few minutes in, it was clear that Joe Biden was being Joe Biden - not the manufactured statesman who represents a return to normalcy and rising above the muck, but the pompous Delaware Senator who insults people, interrupts, refuses to engage, and engages in a milder Mid-Atlantic form of Trump’s New York bombast, repeatedly calling the president a “clown”, saying “shut up man”, and calling him “the worst president America has ever had” - far from the redemptive offering his prepackaged campaign has presented to the country. http://vlt.tc/4352
Perhaps there was nothing Wallace could have done in this situation, but his choice to engage repeatedly just didn’t work. It resulted in repeated instances of Biden talking for two minutes in which he’d throw out multiple claims about Trump, Trump would interrupt with a rejoinder, Wallace would tell Trump to stop talking, and then at the end of the two minutes Wallace would move on to the next question. Trump, infuriated, would bulldoze him and respond anyway. Biden would interrupt with his denial. And on and on.
The result was utterly unsatisfying. Rather than allow the two men to batter each other, Wallace kept trying to seize control. This is, in fairness, in his manner. Having done Fox News Sunday quite a lot during his tenure, I know that he runs one of the most strict panels in the business. He does not like cross-talk or interrupting, he wants order from his panelists, and he will quickly shut you down if you engage in that type of heated back and forth.
This is an old school approach to television panels, and not one that I personally favor because I think it’s less interesting than television where people can jump in and argue. But regardless of preference, it’s also one that just doesn’t work when you have not one but two candidates who don’t respect the rules and meander from subject to subject in avoidance of questions.
This isn’t to say I could’ve done a better job! Wallace’s position was untenable, equipped with a sequence of rules and agreed upon formats and segments that was blown out of the water. But when the candidates are beating the crap out of each other over an issue, you don’t get the plot back by insisting they shift to forest management and electric cars. And if you’re going to shut down the president by teasing a question that never comes, it should probably be on an issue of less significance than Roe v. Wade.
Most Republicans will probably go after Wallace for bias. http://vlt.tc/4355 That somewhat misses the point, which is that you can be biased and still moderate a good debate. That said, it’s impossible to avoid the biased nature of many of the questions asked last night. Wallace’s frame of Critical Race Theory as “racial sensitivity training” was particularly egregious. At a time when Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi are best-selling authors getting paid through the roof prices to spout their message, pretending those two things are the same requires a level of ignorance of the subject that is possible only if you still primarily read all the newspapers on paper.
It seems to me a better approach from Wallace would have been to tee up just one question for each segment and then give the candidates more time to batter each other on the subject with the occasional interjection to stick to the point. It’s harder in such a format to just say, as Biden did on packing the Supreme Court, “I'm not going to answer the question.” http://vlt.tc/4362 But that’s assuming that we retain this old-school solo moderator television format, with two minute answers followed by one minute responses, which seems so very tired to me. These old limitations are ridiculous in the age of unlimited bandwidth and three hour podcasts that are 100 million dollar media properties.
A big part of this problem is The Commission on Presidential Debates, which is a relic. Its board consists of Silent Generation and aged Boomer politicians - including one of JFK’s FCC appointees. The Commission's approach creates debates that are unintelligible and with moderators who cannot effectively extract the truth. They are asking 1980s questions in a 1970s format. It is the reason there are no internet based debates. Its executive director, the same since its inception, has led it since before the end of the Cold War.
The olds running the debates must end. The instant feedback poll from CBS News showed 83 percent of voters were dissatisfied, with just 17 percent positive about the debate - and that’s not just the fault of the candidates. http://vlt.tc/435l In an era where we get more enlightenment from Charlamagne Tha God interviews and Joe Rogan podcasts than Sunday morning sitdowns, it’s high time we would be much better off with longer answers and a debate format with a minimum of two moderators, one coming from the left and another from the right, asking questions of the candidates that more accurately frame the issues both sides care about. But so long as we have the Commission, that would be a bridge too far.
So, who benefits? It seems to me neither side benefits from last night’s debate, which is good for Joe Biden, because as I wrote yesterday, Donald Trump needs the debates to matter. The only degree to which it benefits Trump is that he successfully did the thing he always does: pull his opponents down into the muck with him. http://vlt.tc/435w “No actual transcription could possibly do justice to these 96 minutes of shouts, insults, interruptions, stray thoughts, and loose babble. It was like witnessing an argument about an arcane procedural rule during a senior bingo night at a nursing home in purgatory. It was vicious, tasteless, witless, and (surprisingly, alas) painfully unfunny.”
Biden’s denials on Hunter’s financial dealings, for instance, rang false when he seemed to fall back onto a “don’t come after my family, buster” attitude and then immediately went after Trump’s family. This muddles the issue and leads to outcomes like this, where 57 percent of people say it’s likely Biden and his inner circle have enriched themselves from his political career. http://vlt.tc/435d
Voters know what they’re getting now with both of these candidates as men, but they really don’t know what they’re getting from them as policies. Biden’s policy answers on the Green New Deal (it does work but he doesn’t support it?), on law and order (getting people in Portland to sit down and talk?), and on what he’d do to reopen (get PPE to schools and businesses but also lockdown until nationwide vaccine?) were particularly muddled, and that’s before you get to the more politically dramatic questions of packing the court and eliminating the filibuster.
Biden’s been winning to this point with that muddle by seeming above the fray, a return to the golden days of 2015. After this debate, it seems clearer that when questioned, this is not what he represents. Essentially, his answer is a non-answer, that Trump is bad and in his absence we will muddle through to normalcy. That does allow a critique of his campaign I would expect Trump to hammer in the next debate, which I assume is being moderated by that young up-and-comer Dan Rather.
RELATED: Bedford: A Two-Man Debate Turns Into A Free-For-All, But Did Anyone Win? http://vlt.tc/436i Wegmann: The return of the chaos candidate. http://vlt.tc/4359 Biden Survives Trump's Steamroller. http://vlt.tc/4356 Chaos reigns in first debate. http://vlt.tc/435c Chris Wallace Strains to Control. http://vlt.tc/435e Wallace faces criticism for letting candidates run wild. http://vlt.tc/435p No real Coronavirus answers. http://vlt.tc/435b Tapper: Debate a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a trainwreck. http://vlt.tc/435i
THE ECONOMY:
Disney to Lay Off 28,000 Employees as Disneyland’s Reopening Unclear. http://vlt.tc/435t “Walt Disney Company announced it would lay off about 28,000 employees at its domestic theme parks, making the announcement shortly after the state of California signaled that Disneyland Resort would likely have to remain closed for the foreseeable future due to Covid-19 concerns. The layoffs are the latest example of ongoing tension between governments trying to keep the new coronavirus in check and businesses struggling to make ends meet amid restrictions on the way they can operate.”
Fed’s New Strategy Confronts Old Questions on Financial Trade-Offs. http://vlt.tc/435o “Federal Reserve officials’ promises to hold interest rates very low for a long time could pose a dilemma once the pandemic is over: how to deal with the risk of asset bubbles. Those concerns flared when Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan dissented from the central bank’s Sept. 16 decision to spell out those promises. The Fed committed to hold short-term rates near zero until inflation reaches 2% and is likely to stay somewhat above that level—something most officials don’t see happening in the next three years.”
Boeing to Move All 787 Dreamliner Production to South Carolina. http://vlt.tc/435h “Boeing Co. will set plans this week to consolidate 787 Dreamliner assembly in South Carolina, people familiar with the matter said, ending production of that jetliner in Washington state as the coronavirus pandemic saps demand for aircraft. The decision carries significant implications for the Seattle-area economy and Boeing’s unionized workforce around Puget Sound. It wasn’t clear over what period of time the consolidation would play out, or how many employees might be affected by the move. Boeing could announce the plans as soon as this week, some of the people familiar with the matter said.”
HOUSE DEMOCRATS’ PLANS FOR BIG TECH:
No matter the election result. http://vlt.tc/435f “Democratic lawmakers are expected to call on Congress to blunt the power of big technology companies, possibly through forced separation of online platforms, as a House panel concludes its Big Tech probe.
“The House Antitrust Subcommittee is nearing completion of a report wrapping up its 15-month investigation of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., and Facebook Inc. The report follows the committee’s collection of more than one million documents from the companies and competitors, as well as a July hearing with CEOs of the four tech giants.
“Rep. David Cicilline (D., R.I.), who chairs the subcommittee, has indicated the panel is poised to recommend significant measures targeting Big Tech’s power, including requiring owners of huge technology platforms to separate those platforms from other businesses.
“Mr. Cicilline hasn’t released details, but such a law could potentially ban Amazon from competing with sellers on Amazon.com, or Google from offering services that consumers look for on its search engine.
“You can’t set all the rules, control the marketplace and also sell on it, in the way that Amazon does, for example,” Mr. Cicilline said in a recent podcast for the Brookings Institution think tank.
“The committee’s final report could include the platform-separation idea among a series of policy options, Mr. Cicilline has said. Others include boosting the budgets of U.S. antitrust enforcement agencies, amending U.S. antitrust laws with an eye toward making them less permissive and mandating “interoperability” so that consumers and businesses can more easily move from one tech platform to another.”
VA DISTRICT SPENT EVEN MORE THAN THOUGHT ON IBRAM X. KENDI:
Breaking the bank for what Chris Wallace calls “racial sensitivity training”. http://vlt.tc/436j “Sitting in their living rooms, kitchens, and dining rooms on the morning of August 6, principals, teachers, and other leaders from Fairfax County Public Schools here in northern Virginia tuned into an “exclusive” one-hour “conversation” with author Ibram Kendi. The bill: 20,000, or 333.33 per minute of the chat.
“Because I was curious what my son’s school district had spent for a one-hour talk by a celebrity author, I broke the news of the price tag for the talk in a column for Quillette last week. Now, in new reporting, I’ve learned the one-hour video conversation was just the tip of the iceberg. According to Fairfax County Public Schools spokeswoman Lucy Caldwell, the school district spent another 24,000 on books by Kendi, peddling the ideology of “critical race theory” and “anti-racism” as “required reading” for K-12 students.
“That means Fairfax County spent 44,000 on promoting Kendi for this one event—almost an entire year’s salary for a first-year teacher. Meanwhile, in heartbreaking appeals, two cash-strapped county schoolteachers are soliciting online donations for tools like “Distance Learning Survival Kits” and “Resources for Our Virtual Classroom.” On Sept. 29, the school system’s Minority Student Achievement Oversight Committee issued its 26th report, chronicling schools failing black and Hispanic students from kindergarten, and lamenting that it couldn’t even publish its Parent Advocacy Handbook in Spanish because it didn’t get the 50,000 it needed in its budget.”
FEATURE:
Voegeli: The Weak Leading The Woke. http://vlt.tc/435a
BUILD ME UP, BUTTERCUP:
Scooting for his life. http://vlt.tc/435n
JOBS:
News Editor, ABC News Division, Washington DC. http://vlt.tc/42wp
ITEMS OF INTEREST:
Foreign:
Puzzled scientists seek reasons behind Africa's low fatality rates from pandemic. http://vlt.tc/435j
Behind China’s Decade of European Deals, State Investors Evade Notice. http://vlt.tc/435g
Refugees from tyranny fear rise of the American left. http://vlt.tc/435k
400 Ways U.S. Can Respond To Chinese Aggression In New House Report. http://vlt.tc/4369
How China Is Taking Over International Organizations, One Vote at a Time. http://vlt.tc/436n
Domestic:
Toobin: Harry Reid on the Senate, the Supreme Court, and a Time for Major Change. http://vlt.tc/4358
When Democrats Feel The Urge To Attack ACB, They Should Look to JFK. http://vlt.tc/436b
34 Days Is Plenty Of Time To Confirm Amy Coney Barrett. http://vlt.tc/436f
For Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation process, the Constitution is on Senate GOP's side. http://vlt.tc/435y
Bombshell DNI Letter: Russia Was Aware Of Hillary's Collusion Smear Operation, And U.S. Officials Knew It. http://vlt.tc/4361
DNI declassifies document alleging Russian collusion hoax was Hillary Clinton's idea, Obama was briefed on it. http://vlt.tc/435s
Parents Have No Idea How Badly Online Schooling Is Hurting Their Kids. http://vlt.tc/436d
National Data Release Sheds Light On Past Polling Place Changes. http://vlt.tc/435z
CA School District Pushes 'Systemic Racism' Agenda After A Rope Swing Was Mistaken For A Noose. http://vlt.tc/436p
2020:
Joe Biden Falsely Claims Dr. Fauci Never Flip-Flopped On Masks. http://vlt.tc/4365
Contrary To Debate Claim, Biden Site Says He Supports Green New Deal. http://vlt.tc/436c
Why won’t Biden take a stand against Court packing? http://vlt.tc/435r
Biden Denies Allegations Against His Son Hunter, Claims He 'Did Nothing Wrong'. http://vlt.tc/4363
Transcript: Trump Did Not 'Refuse' To Condemn White Supremacy At Debate. http://vlt.tc/436e
Trump deflects but agrees when asked to condemn militia groups. http://vlt.tc/436l
ADL Winks While Biden And Democrats Smear Trump As A Nazi. http://vlt.tc/436g
Yes, Joe Biden Called U.S. Troops "Stupid Bastards" — Here's The Video. http://vlt.tc/4364
Biden Just Promised No Coal Power Plants Will Ever Be Built In America If He Wins. http://vlt.tc/4366
Miami Hispanics GOPers Laud Trump's Debate Performance. http://vlt.tc/4367
Two-Thirds Of Spanish-Speaking Telemundo Voters Said Trump Won. http://vlt.tc/4368
Zempel: Chris Wallace Just Gave The Most Embarrassing Moderator Performance In History. http://vlt.tc/436h
Trump campaign floods digital airwaves with debate day ad blitz. http://vlt.tc/4354
The Best Thing About Last Night's Debate Were These Tweets. http://vlt.tc/436a
Media:
Ohio State Professor Apologizes for ‘Hurt, Sadness, Frustration, Fatigue, Exhaustion and Pain’ Caused By Pro-Football Article. http://vlt.tc/4353
Religion:
There's Nothing Wrong With Trump Calling Prosperity Gospel Peddlers 'Hustlers'. http://vlt.tc/436q
Ephemera:
Fat Bear Week 2020: Your Guide To The State Of The Race That Matters. http://vlt.tc/436k
How the NFL is playing through Covid. http://vlt.tc/436m
Serena Williams Withdraws From French Open Due to Achilles Injury. http://vlt.tc/435v
Netflix Releases First Look at 'The Crown's' Princess Diana, Margaret Thatcher. http://vlt.tc/4360
PODCAST:
Daniel Turner on Why It's Time To Leave Cities Like Washington D.C. For Good. http://vlt.tc/436o
QUOTE:
“I agree with the realistic Irishman who said he preferred to prophesy after the event.” - G.K. Chesterton
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