Tonight’s debate between Biden and Trump may be the secret to success for each of them

There is wild talk of performance enhancing drugs, rigorous training sessions and spectators across the world sitting on the edge of their seats, awaiting a clash.

 

No, this is not the summer’s Olympic Games we’re talking about — not yet, at least.

 

It’s that other every-four-years event, an American presidential debate.

 

Two ageing titans face off Thursday night on the CNN stage for a 90-minute faceoff, starting at 9 p.m.

 

U.S. President Joe Biden, 81, brings a lifetime of political experience to the debate, the last four of them spent in the White House.

 

The challenger — no spring chicken himself, at 78 years old — is seeking to reclaim the title with a fighting style that leans heavily on chaos and populist discontent.

 

Determining a favourite likely depends on your political persuasion, but opinion polls give the two men even odds of emerging victorious on election day in November.

 

The referees will be CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, but there will also be legions of real-time fact checkers doing their part to weed out the fake news from the facts. (The New York Times announced it would be deploying a squad of 29 fact checkers for the debate.)

With wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, fierce divisions on immigration and concerns about the economy and inflation, the stakes could not be higher.EST.

 

The expectations, though, probably could not be lower.

 

The wildest of the Republicans chattering classes are focused squarely on Biden’s age — and his physical and mental capacity to hold the most demanding office in the land. The chatter is nasty, conspiratorial and mean, resumed in one damning question: How will he manage even to stay on his feet for the entire 90 minutes?

 

North Carolina’s Greg Murphy, a urologist and co-chair of the House of Representatives’ Doctors’ Caucus, has suggested without any proof that the president was “jacked up on something” during a spirited State of the Union address earlier this year in which Biden held his own and even heckled his hecklers.

 

The baseless and widely circulated charge prompted Trump and others to challenge Biden to take a drug test before and after the debate.

 

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson walked those over-the-top comments back Wednesday, but still insisted that the two leaders’ stamina will be on display for viewers.

 

“The question is can (Biden) stay for 90 minutes on that stage and go to-to-toe with President Trump who, as you know, goes to rallies and talks for two hours on end without any breaks and any notes,” he told CNN. “It’ll be a very interesting thing to see.”

 

The question for Trump is how disciplined he will be and whether he can will be bated by the biggest difference since he and Biden last crossed swords: his criminal conviction on charges of falsifying business records, one among a string of legal troubles that hang over his presidential campaign.

 

The first presidential debate in the 2020 campaign was, by most accounts, a shoutfest, with the then-incumbent doing most of the shouting.

 

It was punctuated by Biden shaking his head in mid-sentence frustrations that led to the zinger of the night: “Will you shut up, man? This is so unpresidential.”

 

The moderator in that debate was forced to intervene 145 times, according to a report in The Bulwark, and polls showed that voters started shifting to Team Biden in the aftermath.

 

Trump has reportedly admitted that he was too aggressive in the first 2020 debate and toned down his interventions for the second clash in the campaign he eventually lost.

 

Proof, if it was needed, that debates can and do matter in the election campaign.

 

This time around, the Trump and Biden camps have agreed to have their microphones silenced when it is not their turn to speak, which may lead to a more orderly hashing of the candidates’ respective ideas.

 

Biden has been rehearsing for the debate at Camp David, the presidential retreat, which has been transformed into debate boot camp of sorts. A movie theatre and an airplane hangar have reportedly been equipped with hot studio lights and a replica stage, and the president’s top advisers are taking turns preparing him, with Biden’s personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, apparently playing the role of Trump.

 

“You’re trying to strike a balance between offering a realistic experience … but not slipping into the theatrics,” he told NPR in an interview.

 

Trump, meanwhile, has avoided formal debate rehearsals and instead had advisers run him through policy sessions to bone up on the issues.

 

There has been no shortage of strategic advice for both men.

 

Hillary Clinton, the former Democratic presidential candidate who faced Trump in 2016, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that it would be “a waste of time to try to refute Mr. Trump’s arguments like in a normal debate.”

 

“It’s nearly impossible to identify what his arguments even are. He starts with nonsense and then digresses into blather,” she wrote.

 

She counselled Biden to be “as direct and forceful as he was when engaging Republican hecklers at the State of the Union address in March.”

In a New York Post editorial this week, Trump was advised to play not to his Make-America-Great-Again base, but to the independent voters he will ultimately need to sway if he wants to take back the White House.

 

“You spent much of your 2020 campaign shoring up a base that didn’t need convincing. Don’t make the same mistake this time around,” the paper wrote.

 

“There are millions of American who are upset with Biden, but need reassurance that bringing back Trump doesn’t mean four years of chaos and drama.”

 

What will viewers be watching for? It’s perhaps idealistic to think they’ll be weighing the merits of either leaders’ arguments. Hard even to imagine that there is any voter in America who hasn’t yet formed an opinion of both men, or that they could say anything to change anyone’s mind.

 

And that may be the most important point to consider. Success or failure in a debate occurs not in the brain of the viewer, but in the belly.

 

“At the risk of offending every high school debate coach in America, many voters respond to style more than substance,” wrote veteran U.S. communications expert Frank Luntz. “The well-delivered quip lingers longer than the litany of facts, and the visual often trumps the verbal.”

 

They key for both presidential contenders may lie in playing against type, in defying expectations.

 

 

 

 

This article was first reported by The Star