Debate Debacle
What we witnessed last night wasn’t a debate — it was a reality TV show. It’s no secret that President Joe Biden performed badly, while former President Donald was in his element.
The nation needs to remind itself that this was a fleeting moment. We need some historical perspective and a reality check on all the calls to put someone else at the top of the Democratic ticket.
Contrast the spectacle and associated fundraising spree we witnessed last night with a real televised debate such as the first one between two candidates for the White House in Chicago on September 26, 1960.
photo by Paul Schutzer, The Life Picture Collection, Getty Images
One of the two men at the podiums that night would soon grapple with issues that took America to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even as Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John Kennedy debated, the Vietnam War that killed millions of people, including 54,000 American soldiers, loomed on the horizon.
The debate played a key role in whether American voters would choose the forty-seven-year-old Nixon to lead the country or the forty-three-year-old Kennedy, who had to prove he was mature enough to handle the world’s most demanding job. The verdict wouldn’t be clear until months later.
Then, as now, expansionist ambitions by Russia, the engine of the old Soviet Union, and the Middle East were issues. The influence of televised images would play a key role in the debate and the upcoming election.
In contrast, the rocky performances by both candidates last night wasn’t a real debate between eighty-one-year-old President Biden and seventy-eight-year-old former President Trump. They traded insults and attacks honed by their debate doctors during televised exchanges long on personality and short on substance. The real debate occurred between the spinners, media analysts, and business gurus over who “won” the show. And both candidates used the debate to pad their pockets with classless fundraising appeals.
As a journalist who’s covered or overseen my fair share of elections and the issues they raise, I always tried to serve readers by stepping back and saying: “Wait a minute. What just really happened here?” As old as those debates are, the Nixon-Kennedy contest is a good template for thinking about those questions.
Of course, John F. Kennedy won the White House in an election as controversial as our last one in 2020. What’s essential in framing how to think about what went on last night is what happened next in Kennedy’s presidency.
Twenty-one months after being sworn in, American intelligence officials informed President Kennedy that the Soviet Union was building missile sites in Cuba, just ninety miles off American shores.
The discovery created a national security crisis that peaked during thirteen days in October 1962. Peter Osnos captured the crisis's drama and lessons learned in his book LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail, which runs in installments on Substack. Osnos reports that virtually all of Kennedy’s national security advisors, men with far more military and diplomatic experience than the young President Kennedy, favored an invasion of Cuba.
Kennedy displayed what it takes to be America’s President. He overruled their advice, and he concluded that heeding their counsel would plunge America into a devastating nuclear war far worse than the bombs dropped on Japan in World War II. He urged his advisors to read Barbara Tuchman’s book, The Guns of August, which portrayed how diplomatic and military miscalculations led to World War I, in which forty million human beings were killed or wounded. In the end, Kennedy proved right. A cold war continued, but he averted a hot one.
So, as I step back and examine the debacle we just experienced last night, my question is not who “won,” whether President Biden should drop out, or how many downright lies slipped through Donald Trump’s lips. Instead, I ask myself which of these two old white men I would want to be sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office, facing the consequential decisions Kennedy faced.
What we have is what we have from both parties. I doubt President Biden will drop out of the race. Donald Trump is going nowhere. If the Democrats try to drop Biden from the ticket, the party will look foolish. I doubt they will have time to launch a new national campaign, and introduce a fresh face to the race.
I don’t care if you are a Republican, a Democrat, or, like me, an independent voter. I don’t care if you favor President Biden or former President Trump. I don’t care about what the headlines say. I do care about which of these two men has the temperament, experience, and wisdom to act in the public interest when making such consequential decisions. That is the issue everyone should focus on when casting their vote, not on whether the eighty-one-year-old or seventy-eight-year-old “won” the media circus we now call a “debate.”
We live in a dangerous world. Many of the issues that existed in The Sixties remain with us. Russia threatens historic borders in Europe. The Middle East remains a tinder box ready to erupt into a war that could be far wider than any in history. China is a far bigger threat than when Kennedy and Nixon vied for the White House. We have a revolutionary technology called Artificial Intelligence that is changing our lives more fundamentally than anything I’ve ever imagined. The person who wins the next election should be someone who can form and lead a team capable of grappling with deadly serious issues.
This election involves more than the price of gas, food, or a mortgage. Presidents don’t have as much influence as the markets on such issues as Americans would like to think. Elections are about selecting the right leader so our sons and daughters don’t have to march off to war because our leaders can’t solve problems that threaten all of us.
—James O’Shea
James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.