There’s a lot going on in the Biden-Trump posturing over debates.
There’s a lot going on in the Biden-Trump posturing over debates, and I did my best to cover it all earlier. One further observation is in order. Biden seems to be assuming, rationally, that fewer debates earlier in the cycle present a lower risk for a man of his advanced age and declining capacities. That may be true; it may be true as well for Trump, who will turn 78 before the first debate and hasn’t spent a lot of the last four years having to think on his feet in hostile settings. But there may be a big risk embedded in the proposed schedule of two debates, one on June 27 and one on September 10 — a risk that goes beyond the possibility, which remains deeply unlikely, that a disastrous Biden performance in June could result in him being replaced as the nominee at the Democratic convention in August.
The bigger risk is this: There’s more than two and a half months between the two scheduled debates. What if one of the candidates has a serious senior moment, or just shows up under the weather or complacently unprepared, and has a terrible night? Traditionally, incumbent presidents almost always have a bad first debate — it happened even to Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. Normally, the bad first debate is followed by an ugly weeklong news cycle that focuses the mind and leads to a sharper second performance and a comeback narrative. That didn’t happen for Jimmy Carter in 1980 because there was only one debate. Biden’s schedule isn’t quite that compressed, but if there’s a really bad first debate — especially for Biden, who faces overriding questions of age-related decline — more than two months will pass before there’s a chance to recover. And the questions will hang unanswered the entire time, while bad onstage moments get pressed into ads and circulate unrebutted. If you’re advising an 81-year-old man whose capacity to show up ready to go is in question, that’s actually a massive gamble.