One Man’s Opinion
The first nationally televised presidential debate in 1960, carried simultaneously live on radio, was a gentlemanly contest between then U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Vice-President Richard M. Nixon of California. There was no live audience, no hoopla, and no spin rooms afterward. Analysis was done over the following few days by journalists critiquing performance and fact-checking.
The first nationally televised presidential debate in 1960, carried simultaneously live on radio, was a gentlemanly contest between then-U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Vice-President Richard M. Nixon of California. There was no live audience, hoopla, or spin rooms afterward. Journalists analyzed performance and fact-checked over the following few days.
We have come a long way since, and not necessarily all for the good. The benefits of incumbency since J.F.K.’s upset victory that year have remained potent. If not assassinated, Kennedy was looking good for reelection. Instead, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson ascended to the presidency in 1964 by beating Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. They had no debate.
Due to flagging popularity and health challenges, LBJ declined to seek a second term in 1968, leaving that race to V.P. Hubert Humphrey. Richard Nixon beat Humphrey in 1968 (again with no debate), and then defeated Senator George McGovern in 1972 before the Watergate incident ended Nixon’s time in the White House.
After defeating Nixon’s replacement, Gerald Ford, in 1976, President Jimmy Carter lost in a 1980 landslide. This was due to an inflation-crippled economy, energy shortages, the Iranian hostage crisis, and some incredibly memorable lines during debate performances by his challenger, former California Governor Ronald Reagan.
The next incumbent to lose was President George H. W. Bush, who also faced a souring economy and, during a three-way debate stage, spent too many moments looking disinterested and gazing at his watch instead of engaging his opponents, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and feisty fellow Texan H. Ross Perot. Since that 1992 contest and debate, every incumbent president choosing to face reelection has won, until President Donald Trump experienced a narrow loss in 2020 to current President Joe Biden.
Trump easily dispatched a large field of GOP challengers in 2016, and by the time he debated Democratic Party nominee Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the fall of 2016, his calls to “Lock Her Up,” and repeated calls for Clinton to drop out of the race, as she was at the time under criminal investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and F.B.I., were well worn on the campaign trail.
Yet now, neither Biden nor Trump is their party’s official nominee. Only the Libertarian Party has met in convention, voted, and officially selected its nominee, Atlantan, and somewhat perennial candidate Chase Oliver.
Both major party candidates have eschewed any involvement by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CDP), formed in 1987 as a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization. Though not perfect, the CDP has done an able job for nearly four decades without taxpayer funding or support.
This brings us to 2024. Biden and Trump have each agreed to a rules-laden, audience-free debate on June 27 in CNN’s Atlanta studios. A second debate, to be hosted by ABC News on Sept. 10, is set for the same venue.
Trump will no doubt promise closed borders, mass deportations, the return of a more robust economy, and “non-rigged” elections and judicial proceedings. Biden will declare himself the champion of democracy and the rule of law and will advocate for federal restoration of a woman’s right to legal abortion, as well as more voter demographic “gifts,” such as greater forgiveness of college loan debt.
And though there is a strong distaste among the public for both candidates – with a majority in polls and surveys seeking better choices – there may be few undecided voters that either nominee can sway to switch sides.
Instead, both campaigns are wagering that any debate errors or blow-ups in June or September may live on only in opposing campaign ads or as TikTok memes through the fall and will be considered old news by Halloween.
After all, historically, it has been those late-breaking voters who decide in the last two or three weeks and typically makeup 15 to 20 percent of the voting population who determine the outcome of most presidential contests.
Current circumstances for both candidates also suggest (for different reasons), that only ONE of these two planned debates may actually come together. Of the two, I think Atlanta is more likely, but that September date would put some distance between Trump and his trial verdicts, and by then, the Hunter Biden trial will also have occurred.
Either way, if nothing else, this political theater, like a dumpster fire, will remain hard to look away from, creating presidential campaign moments that we may well recall in good humor or abject horror decades from now.