There is no point to Joe Biden agreeing to debate with Donald Trump, unless Trump agrees to reveal his tax records, as Joe Biden has done, AND it is also agreed that there will be a fact checking team approved by both candidates to be hired by the non partisan Commission on Presidential Debates.
That team would report with ten minutes left in the debate any misleading statements, phony numbers, or outright lies uttered by either candidate.
Trump lies as he breathes, as Thomas Friedman of the New York Times said last month, and Biden should not allow that to go unanswered by a fact checking team at the debate.
Since Biden is comfortably ahead in all polls, he gains nothing by debates, and by refusing to debate, will infuriate Trump, who will go even more looney.
Trump knows he is losing, and Joe Biden should just continue to make public statements before small audiences with proper distancing. Biden is being helped by various Republican groups who are dedicated to Trump’s defeat as the only way to revive the party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Joe Biden has been right since January on the CoronaVirus Pandemic, and should make the effort to win as many states as possible, but the debates make no sense at this point, unless Trump agrees to the two conditions mentioned above, which will not occur!
Trump Doesn’t Know How to Campaign As an Incumbent
The president was never a political mastermind. His 2016 election was a fluke that won’t be repeated.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/08/04/trump-doesnt-know-how-to-campaign-as-an-incumbent/
Once again, Professor: i must agree with You. The last thing Joe Biden and his owners, operators, script writers, directors, and choreographers want is Presidential Debates.
The primary reason Democrats need to hope that there are no debates is because Trump would blow Biden out of the water. Sleepy Joe’s performance in the Democrats Candidates Debates demonstrated that for all to see.
So, yeah, Professor: That’s probably a very good set of non-negotiable demands to be met before any debates can happen.
It’s a shame Your proposed “Fact Check” at the end of the debates wasn’t in effect during those Candidates’ Debates, eh?
And Your headline was absolutely correct up to a point: “PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES ARE WORTHLESS… .”
Very little ~ if anything ~ said by any Presidential candidate during one of those Debates has ever proven to be True as far as what actually happened when that candidate got elected to the Oval Office. Just like any other campaign stop and stump speech.
Yep. “Worthless” is a good word for them, all right.
The No. 1 problem with the debates is that they are corporate-controlled. Corporate news media. Corporate sponsorship. Corporate environment of presenting a false representation of spirited debate which does not really challenge the candidates and the minds of the voting electorate. They are controlled. Controlled by the corporations. Controlled by the two major U.S. political parties. After all, we don’t see candidates on stage who are outside the two major political parties. So, I personally would not mind seeing the debates go. (They are bulls**t.) I can welcome them back after the corporations and the two major political parties no longer have control.
I agree with the reasons only the Professor listed.
If we have the debates this year, they’ll need to be done differently due to the virus.
The Media Needs to Prepare Now for a Very Different Kind of Election Night
With a surge in mailed-in ballots, all of the votes won’t be counted for days—perhaps even weeks.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/08/05/the-media-needs-to-prepare-now-for-a-very-different-kind-of-election-night/
Donald Trump is causing massive headaches for Republican officials with his lies about fraudulent mail-in ballots.
[President Trump’s unfounded attacks on mail balloting are discouraging his own supporters from embracing the practice, according to polls and Republican leaders across the country, prompting growing alarm that one of the central strategies of his campaign is threatening GOP prospects in November.]
No matter how hard they try to thread the needle and suggest that there is a difference between absentee ballots (which they claim are fine) and mail-in ballots, the president’s followers have been trained to swallow anything he utters and are buying his lies.
[A Monmouth University poll of registered voters in Georgia taken late last month found that 60 percent of Democrats are at least somewhat likely to vote by mail this fall, compared with 28 percent of Republicans…
“Please don’t confuse North Carolina’s absentee system with other states’ all-mail elections,†read the message from Darryl Mitchell, chairman of the Johnson County GOP. “NCGOP and JoCo GOP agrees with the President that our current absentee ballot request system is safe and secure.â€
The assurance was met with skepticism from many commenters. “Burned it! I will go in person to vote straight Republican,†wrote one.
“Why is the GOP sending this out,†wrote another, adding: “You know da– well that we are arguing against this, and here it is our own damn party sending this horse dung out?!!! Whoever is in charge of this should be fired. I am going to the polls. Don’t send me one.â€]
As a result, what is likely to happen on election day is that tallies of those who vote in person will be reported first and, as we have seen during the primaries, final results will be delayed for days or even weeks as mail-in ballots are counted. That means that it is very possible that Trump will be in the lead initially, which is why he recently tweeted this:
Must know Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even years later!
In other words, Trump will claim victory on election night and then challenge the results once all of the ballots are counted.
It is important for Democrats to get the message out about what is likely to happen. But ultimately it will be up to news media to make a dramatic change in how they report the results on the night of November 3rd. For example, exit polls will be useless since they only report on those who show up to vote in person. Media outlets should scrap them altogether this time around.
Rather than all of the breathless election reporting, news outlets should spend their time informing the public about why things will be different this time and then provide daily updates on the results. Any Trump victory laps should come with a caution that he’s jumping the gun.
One can only hope that in news rooms all over the country discussions will take place over the next few months about how they need to change their election coverage dramatically in order to keep the public informed. Given their obsession with always being first to report on major developments, I’m not terribly hopeful that they will do so. That failure would play right into Trump’s hands and offer him a platform to sow chaos with the integrity of our elections. In other words, it would make them complicit in undermining our democracy.
We’re doing ours by mail in ballot. We just got our request form today.
I already have voted by mail for several election cycles!
Because of the virus, Biden’s not going to travel to Milwaukee to accept the nomination. Instead, he will accept it from Delaware.
Speaking of lies, Trump falsely claimed that the Beirut explosion was an attack.