Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
The first words out of his mouth were, “He looks so old!” And that’s all you need to know about the first (and possibly last) presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump: the initial impressions of a fourth-grade girl in Brooklyn who had never seen a debate in her life. This was not an example of unacknowledged truth escaping from babies’ mouths; It was, rather, a universal response, a shattering moment that has upended the race and sparked a wave of calls for Biden to step aside. And there’s a part of me that regrets that she had to experience it.
There’s also a part of me that’s glad it was that way. I vaguely remember the first debate I saw, between George HW Bush and Michael Dukakis, back in the mists of time, during a visit to relatives in Washington, DC. Naturally, I asked who we were supposed to support. “We are Democrats,” my father said, in a tone tinged with disapproval, as if even considering that voting Republican was tantamount to betraying our values and ideals, that is, who we were. That’s all I remember from that night, a pretty typical meal for a liberal Irish-American family on the East Coast. (To give an idea of my family’s politics, I recently attended a gathering where one of my uncles was wearing a “Free Wednesdays” t-shirt, which he had never seen free before.) Yet it was also formative, because that is, in fact, how political and tribal identities are determined, around the sepia glow of a television, all of us nervously praying that this guy named Dukakis defeats another guy named Bush.
In addition to indoctrinating my daughter into a life of frustration and disappointment, after last night I remembered the banners hanging in The Simpsons Democratic National Committee version: “We hate life and ourselves” and “We cannot govern”; I also wanted to introduce you to the strange glories of American democracy in action, to see with your own eyes the grisly spectacle that has long fascinated me and that, somewhat unexpectedly, has become the center of my career. Debate is a lesson in civility, the democratic process boils down to the basics of two opponents arguing a point before an audience of voters, except it’s mixed with the kind of gladiatorial spectacle that makes politics absurd, stupid and fascinating. , which turns it into entertainment. . I wanted to show him that being interested in politics can be fun.
Except this was the opposite of fun. From the moment Biden opened his mouth, emitting a vaporous whisper from the ancient cave of her throat, I began to moan into the couch. “What’s happening?” she asked. She asked this question over and over again, while I squirmed and clutched my head in response to Biden resisting for what seemed like small eternities between words, and her sentences petered out in trails of shattered thoughts. “It’s not supposed to be like this” is what I kept saying by way of explanation, even though she had no way of understanding how it was supposed to be. Even worse, in my opinion, were the moments when Biden didn’t speak, when Trump with great verve and conviction uttered every crazy, hateful thing in his head, and the split screen showed Biden staring unblinking into the distance, as if He was caught in the web of his own dreams, which is another way of saying the web of his old age.
My daughter went to bed before the debate was over, and the first thing she said when she woke up the next morning was, “Who won?” Well, Trump did, I told her, and his victory was so decisive that we will now have to determine whether Biden can continue to top the ticket. She dropped hers the Simpson reference, saying that Biden could be like Mr. Burns in the episode where he receives injections that allow him to live forever but force him to say “I bring you love” in a high-pitched voice. In fact, I said, a colleague of mine said that she would rather have a not-dead Biden than a living, breathing Trump in the White House, and I naturally feel the same way, but that it didn’t seem responsible to vote for someone who has deteriorated so manifestly in recent years. four years and will undoubtedly deteriorate further in the next four. And so the morning went, which would seem like evidence that letting her watch the debate was, overall, a net positive result, both in terms of real-world knowledge gained and father-daughter bond.
But there was a moment when she was watching these two men on screen that just felt wrong, for lack of a better word. There was the direct exposure to Trump, of course, which always feels like playing with some radioactive substance. But it was also disheartening to see a young person witness Biden falter in such a humiliating way, as if she were unwittingly watching a form of abuse. How could these two senile creatures fighting over golf be our only options? How could the Democrats have allowed this to happen? I kept telling her, “It’s not supposed to be like this,” but this is as it is. And what’s worse, for people like us, at least, who have been led to believe that we are connected in some deep and important way to the Democrats, this is what we are.
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