Debate And Choice: The Days After

Four months to election day, November 5, and the election more and more resembles a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. New events surprise, defy and stagger imagination.

Thursday June 27, a day that will live in Democratic infamy. To banish suspicions of Biden’s dotage and confirm Trump’s deterioration, with great hopes the White House encouraged the debate only to have their worst fears come true.

Biden seemed lost in search of the false teeth he didn’t have in the first place. He occasionally babbled and lapsed into incoherence. He often mumbled and regularly looked down and vacant for much of the 90 minutes. Towards the end, he occasionally emerged from stupor, but as quickly as the clouds parted they closed to record the most dismal debate performance of recorded history.

Trump in contrast appeared youthful (he is actually 78), vigorous and commanding, albeit deceitful, vain, overbearing, and unmistakenly unlikeable. His persona was the tawdry salesman, so many variants on a single character expressive of one vicarious, voracious, voluminous ego, spewing exaggerations, lies, and invective in a trade mark staccato style of vehemence and bravado.

Two, not one, big questions emerged: can Biden beat Trump?  can he adequately serve for four more years, until his 86th birthday in 2028?

How far has his mental and physical soundness already frayed and how much further might it deteriorate in the coming four years? What makes answers difficult is what we don’t know: what counts as “soundness?” But there is even a greater difficulty from what we do know: what Trump, unregenerate and degenerate, has done and promises to do to enemies and the rule of law if re-elected.

Monday the Supreme Court in its decision on presidential immunity added, in steroids, to what we know. Richard Nixon must be turning over in his grave with envy that he was too young to enjoy the fruits of the Roberts court. Presidents have absolute immunity for some and presumptive immunity for most other presidential actions, a novel doctrine which effectively shields the president from prosecution.

Within days Trump appealed his felony conviction on grounds supposedly related to that shield. Then he indulged his penchant for vengeance by announcing Liz Cheney and a host of others (including Senate Republican Minority Leader McConnell and the sitting president) should be tried not before the courts, but by military tribunals, and executed.

Democrats responded to the debate with subterranean panic and surface excuses and calls to rally behind Biden. Biden’s response has been to circle the wagons: characterize June 27 as a regrettable single day, an exceptional hiccup, and then produce a flurry of meticulously choreographed and tele-promptered rally rants.  This is the kind of one-way communication Trump excels at (minus the teleprompter). Rallies energize him whereas for Biden they project the appearance of energy.

The effect of all this is to enhance Trump’s campaign and diminish Biden’s odds of winning. What if Biden were to step aside? There would be perilously little time, just over four months, to engineer a new campaign. The task would be lessened if Kamala Harris were anointed heiress. She could run as Biden’s champion without his personal negatives.  However she might not be able to dispel the curious disjunct between economic performance and political popularity which plagued in such bewilderment the Democrats. And as a Black woman, she would run into the double crossfire of ingrained American prejudices.

Were she challenged and/or the August Democratic convention open up to a real contest,  the barely concealed unity of the party could be ripped apart and painful, shattering memories of Chicago in 1968 be evoked in 2024. So the odds are Biden will remain the candidate.

For the American public, the choices for president seem likeliest to boil down to that between a shiny-suited, slickly-coifed and dishonest used car salesman offering a lemon and a barely sentient, doddering old codger, however sympathetic and deserving, but who would buy the car. To quote from the eminent philosophers Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel, “what a fine mess” we are in. Indeed!