The Not-So-Great Debate

Ernest Bevin was a British Union leader and Member of Parliament of the Labour Party in the first half of the 20th century. He helped organized the General Strike in Great Britain in 1926 and then went on to become a cabinet minister in the governments of both Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee. He left school at age eleven, but like many self-made and self-educated men, his reading vocabulary was more ample than his spoken one.

During one late-night debate in the British Parliament, he said, “I’ve been here all night and all I’ve ‘eard is bloody clitches.” Clichés was the word he was going for, and his comment came back to me the other evening when ex-President Trump and Vice President Harris were engaged in what is misnamed a debate.

It was a contest of sound bites managed by two very partisan moderators of ABC. (I do not think that reading summaries of news prepared by others qualifies one to be called a journalist. They do not report, although they may editorialize by spinning the news report given to them.) The two broadcasters actually challenged ex-President Trump by quoting Vice President Harris several times. There is no question about where their sympathies lay during the debate—they did not even make the pretense of just affording the candidates a chance to speak. 

There was great expectation about the so-called debate before it happened, and said expectation was certainly misplaced. Presidential debates have never been famous as fora for the discussion of great ideas. They are sometimes remembered for quips by the participants. Candidate Ronald Reagan’s “there you go again” to the remarks of President Carter resounded through the country, also. The same is true of what he said in his campaign for reelection promising not to disparage the youth and inexperience of his opponent Walter Mondale. Ex-President Trump’s comment that he did not know what President Biden was saying in the debate in June and doubted that his opponent did either will probably be recalled.

Debates ideally are supposed to clarify positions and contrast ideas. The exercise that Trump and Harris were engaged in during their first debate was all about rhetoric. The historian and critic Lord Macaulay, in his essay on Athenian orators, said that “The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion.” Vice President Harris was rated by many—although most of them were already her supporters prior to the event—as the victor of the debate because she was not at all concerned about what President Trump said but only what she wanted to say. Her sound bites dropped like gumballs until there were no more. Truth was the least of her worries; sounding authoritative, not to say sarcastic, was of the essence. 

She criticized tariffs, and he replied that the Biden administration had left them in place. Ignoring this inconvenient datum, she gave sweeping promises about the economy. Harris was chosen in a process that recalled the PRI regimes in Mexican history where the presidential candidate of the party was chosen by “dedazo” (the preceding head of government’s pointed finger at his choice). Nevertheless, she reminded her debating partner that she is not President Biden and implied that she did not have to defend the administration she participated in. If she had been uncomfortable with President Biden’s decisions, or even his decision-making ability, it was an extremely well-kept secret contradicted many times by her own words.

When ex-President Trump asked her in an aside if she would be in favor of abortion in the seventh or eighth month of pregnancy, her answer was, “Oh, come on!” Her memorized line about 81 million people “firing” the ex-president is weak considering that Biden’s supposed total (according to The World Almanac) was 74,488,666 and Trump’s 70,337, 285; and the electoral college vote would have been given another result by slim margins in various states.

The anything but moderate “moderators” of the debate felt compelled to correct ex-President Trump alleging the impossibility of live births from abortion, which is a known fact. He asserted that two governors were on record as opposing saving the life of such fetuses who dared to breathe after their destruction was attempted, and one of the moderators said, “That is not legal in any state.” The question of legality may be true, but many illegal things happen despite laws. When the same moderator timidly asked Harris about what she thought of late-term abortions, the candidate answered she believed in the same “protections” of Roe v. Wade. “Protections for whom?” didn’t cross the broadcaster’s mind, apparently.

Harris several times alleged that Trump was behind or subscribed to the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 manifesto. It was not enough for Trump to say that he did not even read it, which would be enough in a debate unless there were proof of it. She also attacked him for the Alabama decision on IVF even though he had lamentably and egregiously supported that very sloppy science that makes our hospitals like Frankenstein’s castle. She threw anything that might stick at the ex-president, regardless of his words.

But words were not the only aspect of the debate. The theatrically petulant grimaces Harris gave as Trump spoke were quite effectively highlighted by the split screen approach of ABC. Kabuki masks could not have been more stylized than her facial contortions. 

This was not a debate. It was a joint appearance plotted as a ping-pong back-and-forth interview by two polemical admirers of the vice president. The absence of an audience was part of the unreality of this studio staging of political theater. This was not a debate. It was a joint appearance plotted as a ping-pong back-and-forth interview by two polemical admirers of the vice president.Tweet This

Abraham Lincoln wrote to Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, “Will it be agreeable to you to make an arrangement for you and myself to divide time, and address the same audience in the present canvas?” The debate between the two of them, which also involved negotiation and misunderstandings in process, inspired the tradition of which last week’s programing was the reductio ad absurdum, a low point in the public discourse of our democracy. 

“I appear before you today for the purpose of discussing the leading political topics which now agitate the public mind,” is how Douglas opened his remarks. You can read the whole text of the debates in the Library of America first volume of Lincoln’s speeches and writings. Douglas accused Lincoln of being anti-patriotic because he was dividing the States of the Union. Lincoln’s answer, which would be worth Trump’s attention, is brilliant: “When a man hears himself somewhat misrepresented, it provokes him—at least, I find it so with myself, but when the misrepresentation becomes very gross and palpable, it is more apt to amuse him.”

Lincoln denied that he believed in the “political and social equality” of black people, something Douglas charged him with. He said his opponent was making a “specious and fantastic arrangement of words” in order to “prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse.” Trump likewise shied away from his former pro-life language in the debate. He is not going to fight against the headwinds of secular love of abortion by invoking principle. 

Perhaps he is just pragmatically giving up that fight in a post-Christian nation, of which one symbol is that a candidate for president is named for a Hindu goddess of love. Lincoln similarly swore no interest of interfering “with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” It was not Lincoln’s finest hour—nor was it Trump’s—to declare a moral issue merely the choice of the States. However, in both the cases of Douglas and Harris, the alternative candidates were overwhelmingly and unashamedly wrong, so that there should be no doubt about whom to support.

It’s raining clitches, this election, as Bevin would say. But we can’t lose heart, and we must not stop praying. We mustn’t forget to carry an umbrella and wade through the puddles to get to the better-albeit-imperfect of two options. 

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]