Three things I hope I won’t hear tonight (but I know I will)
Presidential debates are a staple of American political theater. They are, aside from syndicated television shows, the most-watched media in which you already know what you’re going to hear, yet you tune in anyway.
The only actual news (as opposed to campaign-driven narratives) that gets made tonight will occur if someone faints onstage, rushes a moderator or switches parties on live television. Aside from that, it’s mostly rehearsed campaign soundbites, just as it was when the Democratic Party held a YouTube debate in which people like Chris Dodd answered questions the same way they’d answered them before. And when it isn’t rehearsed soundbites, it’s equivocation and lies.
Those rehearsed soundbites include:
- “We must defeat Donald Trump.”
Those five words seem obvious, but they’re both short-sighted and limiting.
Those five words are limiting because America had structural problems before Donald Trump was anything, and America will have structural problems after Donald Trump dies. So any candidate who frames the issue as being only about Trump either doesn’t see America as having core problems or is trying to appeal to people who see Trump as being the only issue.
Those five words are short-sighted because lining up candidates to defeat whichever person doesn’t work.
In 2012, the Republican presidential candidates were united in their belief that the most important thing was to defeat President Obama. They — and Republican voters — lost.
In 2004, “Anyone but Bush Again” was a significant movement among the left online. It failed.
Congressional Republicans even attempted a modified version of the same tactic in a different setting in 1995. It failed.
You have to give people something to be for, which is part of what happened in 1992 (and 1960, and 2008).
2. “I oppose socialism.”
I oppose the ritualistic dismembering of orphaned kittens in supermarkets on alternating Wednesdays.
Since nobody is proposing such a dastardly act, my opposing it seems less than necessary, no? Nevertheless, several presidential candidates have made a point of opposing something nobody is proposing. And when he takes the debate stage, John Delaney will likely make a point of opposing something nobody is proposing.
(Hickenlooper takes the stage tomorrow, and he’ll probably talk about his failure to insure every Coloradan — when you get insurance to slightly more than half of the uninsured population, you fail to insure everyone — as evidence that what we need is not socialism (which nobody is proposing) but pragmatic progressivism, which appears to be rhetoric to distract people from the fact that his big talking point is that he left office with the job undone.
… yay?
Now, he did help get more people covered: The uninsured rate was 14.3 percent in 2013 and 6.5 percent in 2017, so he helped. But 40 percent of the states in this country have lower uninsured rates than Colorado’s.)
Delaney will probably deliver language that’s similar to what got him booed in California at the beginning of the month. He’s opposing something nobody is proposing, and he’s appealing to a disappearing demographic, but he is who he is. (An eventual dropout.)
3. “I support Medicare-for-All [as of this second, for individual donor fundraising purposes].”
This is going to be the fascinating one. There’s the Medicare-for-All crowd, and there’s the Medicare-for-America crowd, and there’s the Medicare-for-more crowd, and there’s probably at least one more crowd.
If Medicare for All and not-Medicare for All differ only in name, they differ in name. Some presidential candidates, such as Amy Klobuchar, have stayed away from saying that they have the grit to keep at it until they pass Medicare for All. But there’s saying it at a town hall, there’s saying it in a fundraising email, and there’s saying it in front of a massive television audience some of whose members aren’t going to check every lie they hear.
So I am expecting at least one of tonight’s contenders — and everyone is a legitimate contender this early, since early polling has zero bearing on the identity of the eventual nominee — to lie about supporting Medicare for All. And I am further expecting that contender to get called out on that lie and to assert — with a ghastly “how DARE you sir!” face, and an elevated “how DARE you sir!” tone, and possibly some grand “how DARE you sir!” hand gesture— that she or he is telling the unvarnished truth about having supported Medicare for All since Harry Truman’s father was in diapers.
(The truth will be that she or he knows full-well that she or he is lying.)
Three other things will happen shortly before or after this person lies about supporting Medicare for All:
A) Someone will say blah blah can’t have socialism pragmatic progressive or whatever other “no, we can’t” defeatist language.
B) “How do you PAY for it?” (It costs less than the broken system that’s killing people, so that’s how you pay for it, you person who as president will watch people die for no good reason.)
C) Whichever other person who has a plan that isn’t Medicare for All — my money’s on John Delaney — will say that Medicare for All won’t work but that she or he has a plan that will work. If it is John Delaney, the language might be something like this: “Medicare for All isn’t good policy or good politics. My plan, BetterCare, [rest of sentence].”
But back to the liar: This person will be lying about Medicare for All for one primary reason: money. The third set of debates, in September, requires a 130,000-donor buy-in. If you haven’t shimmied your way into that many wallets by then, Tom P is officially not a fan of you anymore, so maybe you take a policy that is highly popular among Democrats and claim you’re for it, and anyone who doesn’t do their homework on your actual stance throws you a dollar before they learn an unfortunate fact:
You. Just. Lied.
The political media will, of course, not seize on that or any other corporatist lie. We are, after all, talking about people who get paid to entertain, not to inform. No, the Brigade of Professionally Wrong Adults will be obsessed with “who won” the debate. And as irrelevant a question as that is — because, again, early polls don’t matter, and polls will move depending on debate performance — it will be paired with a video clip of five or six made-for-TV dramatic moments … which, again, won’t matter, but at the national level, political reporting is largely about entertaining people, not informing them.
So with all that said, why even fucking watch this expected shit show of lies, pointless drama and buffoonery?
Because the odds are roughly even that the Democratic Party’s next presidential nominee will be on the stage tonight.
Early polling doesn’t matter. Roughly half of the field will lie to the country tonight. It’s probably a good idea to familiarize yourself with those lies early so you can warn your friends. (Please understand, my pessimism is nonpartisan. Democrats lie. Republicans lie. Independents lie. They all fucking lie, and to pretend otherwise is to operate Jerry’s Invisible Pink Unicorn Ranch. It’s a nice fantasy, but it divorces you from the reality of death and taxes.)