{"id":90452,"date":"2020-10-16T06:12:20","date_gmt":"2020-10-16T03:12:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/trump-vs-biden-ii-clickers-cant-be-choosers\/"},"modified":"2020-10-16T06:12:20","modified_gmt":"2020-10-16T03:12:20","slug":"trump-vs-biden-ii-clickers-cant-be-choosers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/trump-vs-biden-ii-clickers-cant-be-choosers\/","title":{"rendered":"#Trump vs. Biden II: Clickers can’t be choosers"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Trump vs. Biden II: Clickers can’t be choosers<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Paul Wells: In their duelling town halls, Biden may have got off easy, but he was sharp and well-prepared. Trump’s show, meanwhile, turned into a rough ride.\n <\/div>\n
\n Like you, I\u2019m taken aback when an incumbent head of government doesn\u2019t even want to show up for a debate. But there\u2019s nothing to be done for it. Donald Trump doesn\u2019t like to be interrupted while he\u2019s busy interrupting, so he decided to skip the \u201cvirtual\u201d debate that would have had him and Biden sparring in separate cities. Instead he and Joe Biden had simultaneous \u201ctown hall\u201d events in separate cities.<\/p>\n

Surely everyone else did what I was doing, which was to bounce back and forth between the two shows. So it wasn\u2019t a virtual debate but it was virtually a debate.<\/p>\n

Actually Trump\u2019s event, on NBC from the courtyard of the Perez Art Museum in Miami, was pretty much a debate all by itself. The president went toe to (rhetorical, decorously distanced) toe with Today<\/em> show host Savannah Guthrie, who might have become Biden\u2019s running mate if he could see how determined she was in confronting Trump. It took 20 minutes before Guthrie let anyone in the Miami audience ask a question. By that time she had established that Trump refuses to answer whether he took a COVID-19 test on the day of the last debate; that the only thing he\u2019ll admit to knowing about QAnon is that they\u2019re \u201cvery much against pedophilia\u201d, which is like saying the only thing you know about Hannibal Lecter is that he\u2019s big on fava beans; and that when he retweeted<\/a> a ludicrous QAnon theory that Barack Obama had the Osama bin Laden killing faked, he was just promoting a healthy diversity of opinion.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile on ABC from the Philadelphia Constitution Center, George Stephanopoulos was freshening up Joe Biden\u2019s mai tai, and sure, some viewers found the contrast a bit jarring. But to be fair, Biden\u2019s answers tend to steer closer to verifiable truth and further from the plot of an X-Files rerun than do Trump\u2019s. So to some extent it would have been difficult for ABC to match NBC\u2019s level of heated confrontation beat for beat.<\/p>\n

Anyone watching both shows and sympathetic to Trump would have seen the night as evidence that the fake-news<\/a> media<\/a> is out to get him. Even as someone sympathetic to Biden, I wish he\u2019d had to face more real skepticism from his chosen interrogators.<\/p>\n

Even one of the ABC show\u2019s few tense confrontations came from a voter to Biden\u2019s left. Cedric Humphrey, a Black student who identified himself as a \u201cprogressive Democrat,\u201d asked what Biden would say to young Black voters \u201cwho see voting for you as further participation in a system that continually fails to protect them.\u201d Besides, Humphrey said, telling them \u201cYou ain\u2019t Black,\u201d a pointed reference to one of Biden\u2019s more patronizing campaign-trail remarks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Biden began his response with a glib shout-out to \u201cmy buddy John Lewis,\u201d referring to the late congressman and civil-rights hero<\/a>, who Biden said would have urged young Humphrey to vote. The rest of his answer was detailed, essentially incremental, and not directly an answer to Humphrey\u2019s question about systemic failure.<\/p>\n

After Biden had gone on at some length about universal pre-kindergarten, an end to neighbourhood-based discriminatory zoning practice known as \u201credlining,\u201d and much else, Stephanopoulos asked Humphrey whether he felt the Democrat had answered his question. \u201cI guess so,\u201d Humphrey said mildly.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, there\u2019s a lot more if you want to hear it. Stick around after and I\u2019ll tell you,\u201d Biden said, prompting nervous laughter from his questioner. \u201cNo, but I mean it,\u201d said Biden, and for all I know he\u2019s still there now.<\/p>\n

Over on NBC, Trump was in his fifth consecutive year of insisting he\u2019ll release his tax records just as soon as he\u2019s allowed. Of the New York Times<\/em>, which has been releasing Trump tax details that would be shocking if we hadn\u2019t all lived through the last four years, he said, \u201cIf they have my tax returns they have to go to jail because it\u2019s illegal. But their numbers are wrong.\u201d Which is news to me: you can go to jail for not having a guy\u2019s correct tax information?<\/p>\n

One woman in scarlet-red glasses greeted Trump with, \u201cI have to say you have a great smile. He does! You look so handsome when you smile.\u201d Then she whacked him with a question about strip<\/a>ping children of immigrants of their hitherto-protected rights, he responded with false claims<\/a> that he hasn\u2019t done that. Which forced Guthrie, the moderator, to correct him again. Which made half of GOP Twitter complain that she was being mean to him again.<\/p>\n

Back at ABC, Biden was facing perhaps his roughest patch of the night, on his refusal to say<\/a> whether he\u2019d \u201cpack\u201d the Supreme Court to respond to Trump\u2019s late-inning nomination of Amy Coney Barrett. Doesn\u2019t Trump have the right to nominate a Supreme Court justice even this late in the game<\/a>, Stephanopoulos asked? \u201cOnce the voting has started, it\u2019s inconsistent with the principles of the constitution,\u201d Biden said. \u201cIn my view. You\u2019ll get disagreement among scholars.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scholars. Biden also said he \u201cwas able to bring down the cost per BTU of wind and solar,\u201d that he\u2019d \u201clike to be moving in the direction of developing electric vehicles,\u201d and that he\u2019d like to \u201cpelletize all the chicken manure and all the horse manure and cow manure\u201d to get the methane out of it and use it for fertilizer. I guess it was a little bit like what life in Canada would have been like if St\u00e9phane Dion had won the 2008 election and never left office.<\/p>\n

The night was almost like watching two different shows, which may have been because it was two different shows. Biden\u2019s on ABC was a flashback to a lost time when people were gentle toward one another and it was possible to imagine a U.S. administration having an opinion on pelletization and the luxury of pursuing it. Trump\u2019s on NBC\u2014conceived as a way to make trouble for Biden without having to share a virtual platform with him; this is how you debate if you\u2019re prone to bone spurs<\/a>\u2014turned into a rough ride. One presumes he\u2019ll complain about his treatment for weeks.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m left wondering what an undecided voter who saw a bit of both shows will think. Trump was, by his standards, on good behaviour, though not, by his standards, conspicuously more truthful. I can\u2019t imagine anyone wavering on how to vote would be swayed by what Trump showed them. Biden seemed sharp and well prepared, though he\u2019s often been derided as neither. He dodged important questions, couldn\u2019t figure out how to answer others, but he offered a glimpse of a future where government might concentrate on government again, instead of on score-settling, denial and profiteering. On this night, at least, he was the Biden Trump hoped voters wouldn\u2019t see. This campaign is not going the way Trump needs it to, and these parallel performances did nothing to change that trajectory.
\n<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Trump vs. Biden II: Clickers can’t be choosers” Paul Wells: In their duelling town halls, Biden may have got off easy, but he was sharp and well-prepared. Trump’s show, meanwhile, turned into a rough ride. Like you, I\u2019m taken aback when an incumbent head of government doesn\u2019t even want to show up for a debate….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":90453,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/GettyImages-1229094266-766x431.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[67904,4941,67806,991,75994],"class_list":["post-90452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-2020-u-s-election","tag-donald-trump","tag-editors-picks","tag-joe-biden","tag-town-hall"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}