Skip to main content

New top story from Time: What to Watch For In Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s First Presidential Debate

https://ift.tt/3kSr0zp

Four years ago, Donald Trump prepared to debate his general-election opponent for the first time. Down in the polls to an experienced, traditional pol, he had been reduced to spreading weird rumors and casting doubt on the legitimacy of the vote, even as questions swirled about his personal finances.

Now Trump is the incumbent president, and the conditions could not be more different as he prepares for his first debate with Democratic nominee Joe Biden on Tuesday: a nation wracked by disease, disorder and disasters; an election neither candidate is treating like a foregone conclusion. And yet the similarities to 2016 are striking, from new questions about Trump’s taxes to another open Supreme Court seat. The main similarity, of course, is Trump—a singular political figure who has intensely polarized the nation.

The debate, scheduled to begin at 9 p.m. Eastern at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, is especially momentous because voters have had few opportunities to see the candidates up close. Both Trump and Biden have curtailed their travel and in-person campaigning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, though Trump has resumed holding versions of his signature rallies in recent weeks.

Moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News plans to focus the 90-minute discussion on the pandemic, the economy, the court, the candidates’ records, election integrity, and “race and violence in our cities.” Other news—such as a New York Times report that Trump has paid a negligible amount of income taxes over the past decade—could also be on the table.

Trump has not debated since his face-offs with Hillary Clinton four years ago. At the time, his refusal to release his tax returns was much in the news. When Clinton suggested he might be hiding a failure to pay income tax, Trump responded, “That makes me smart.” He also repeatedly refused to pledge to accept the results of the 2016 election if he lost. Meanwhile, Trump and his campaign stoked rumors that Clinton’s “stamina” had been damaged by unknown health conditions.

Though pundits and polls repeatedly judged Clinton the winner, those debates are now principally remembered for Trump’s jarring diversions—at various times, he lurked behind Clinton as she spoke; brought four alleged victims of sexual misconduct by her husband as his guests; and promised to jail her if elected (a pledge he notably abandoned).

Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the daily D.C. Brief newsletter.

Trump may be a rusty debater, but his relentless presence on Twitter and television over the past four years has accustomed and perhaps inured the American public to his unwavering style: the lilting recitations, fact-challenged asides and derogatory nicknames. After four unrelenting years, Trump will find it difficult to change anyone’s preconceived opinion of him.

Trump has continually portrayed Biden as “dumb,” incompetent and senile, devoid of energy and hiding from voters. Trump’s advisers privately worry he’s set expectations too low—that Biden’s ability to string sentences together will now strike people as impressive. Trump allies have falsely accused Biden of relying on teleprompters, and in recent days Trump himself has trollishly demanded the candidates take a drug test before the debate—another tactic recycled from his tussle against Clinton four years ago.

Political experts say Trump thrives on breaking decorum and creating a memorable spectacle, daring his opponent to object to his out-of-bounds tactics. “Can Biden hold it together against a no-holds-barred wrestler who’s willing to throw sand in people’s faces, gouge eyeballs, exaggerate facts and say things without evidence?” says Will Ritter, a Virginia-based GOP consultant unaffiliated with the Trump campaign. “Do you try to correct him like Hillary did, or do you try to throw your own sand? If you spend the whole time going, ‘No, no, he can’t say that, that’s not true,’ he’s still winning.”

Cleveland Prepares For First Presidential Debate
Win McNamee—Getty ImagesStudents stand-ins for U.S. President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden respectively, participate in a rehearsal for the first presidential debate at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, September 28, 2020.

Biden served as vice president for eight years and has been a fixture of national politics for debates, yet is still a less familiar figure to the public, to the point that some Democratic campaigners worry he remains ill-defined. Trump and his allies have signaled they plan to deploy a version of the anti-Clinton playbook, seeking to turn the established politician’s experience into a negative by casting him as part of the failed policies of the past.

In vice presidential debates in 2008 and 2012, Biden cut a fast-talking, sometimes wise-cracking figure, mingling folksy turns of phrase with senatorial disquisitions on the finer points of policy. Ritter, who helped prepare then-GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan to debate Biden in 2012, recalls, “Joe does the ‘aw, shucks, man,’ kind of thing really well, which allows him to roll off the ropes pretty easily. Hillary didn’t have that personality gear.”

Biden has aged since then, and his recent debates against Democratic counterparts were inconsistent. His answers were often meandering or clumsily worded, and he sometimes got lost in obscure reminiscence. Still, his opponents’ attacks rarely seemed to register and frequently backfired; his essential humanity, former opponents say, tended to shine through. “He has this thing where he’ll just flash this big, high-wattage smile instead of getting nasty or defensive, and it serves him well,” says Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist who masterminded Pete Buttigieg’s primary campaign and is unaffiliated with the Biden camp. “He’s a sympathetic figure—there’s just not much value in punching Uncle Joe in the face.”

Democrats are haunted by the ghosts of 2016, when many believe Clinton put too much emphasis on attacking Trump and not enough on defining her own vision or making the case that she represented a change from the status quo. That remains a danger for Biden, whose supporters, polls have shown, are motivated primarily by passionate dislike for Trump.

But Trump, Democrats argue, will have a harder time playing the outsider now that he is the incumbent. “Trump thrives at the lowest level, in the sewer, and he’s going to try everything he can to get Joe Biden down there with him,” Smith says. “But now that we’ve seen what four years of Trump is like, it’s harder to pull the wool over the eyes of voters like he did last time.”

Though the debate promises to be exciting, political observers express doubt that it will have much effect on the outcome of a campaign whose fundamentals have been remarkably stable. Biden leads nationally by an average of seven percentage points—a lead that has neither expanded nor contracted substantially since the onset of COVID-19 or the other seismic events of this dismal year. His leads in most swing states have been similarly steady.

“If a global pandemic and recession couldn’t fundamentally change the numbers in this race, it’s hard to believe 90 minutes of televised debate will,” Smith says.

Ritter, the GOP consultant, echoed that analysis. In the populations his firm contacts for down-ballot campaigns, “we’re not seeing a lot of swing voters,” he says. “People might be tuning into the debate to see if Joe Biden will melt or Donald Trump will do something so beyond the pale it takes your breath away. But I don’t think anyone is going in with an open mind, just curious to see what these two candidates for higher office have to say.”

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

L Taraval Improvement Project Update

L Taraval Improvement Project Update By Sevilla Mann Roundtable at the Community Parklet Shares Project Updates  This past week, the SFMTA hosted a media roundtable discussing updates about the L Taraval Improvement Project at the community parklet located in front of the The Rolling Out Café  on Taraval St.   Segment B construction began in February 2022 and is scheduled to be completed Fall 2024. Sewer and water infrastructure work is currently taking place. Future work includes track work, overhead line work, the construction of new boarding islands and streetscape improvements.    On hand to answer questions and provide updates was District Four Supervisor Gordon Mar, SFMTA Board Director Sharon Lai and Director of Transportation Jefferey Tumlin.   The Roundtable  Supervisor Mar opened the discussion by highlighting the many benefits that the local community will receive with the planned infrastructure upgrades along the corridor. These benefits include:   Replacing sew

FOX NEWS: Cincinnati zoo renames sloth habitat after late 1-year-old who loved sloths The sloth habitat at Ohio's Cincinnati Zoo will be named after a toddler who recently passed away.

Cincinnati zoo renames sloth habitat after late 1-year-old who loved sloths The sloth habitat at Ohio's Cincinnati Zoo will be named after a toddler who recently passed away. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/3DLAshi

IPL 2020 | KKR, SRH search for first win to get off the mark https://ift.tt/333a9nc

Having suffered defeats in their opening games, the Kolkata Knight Riders and Sunrisers Hyderabad will lock horns on Saturday at the Sheikh Zayed Stadium in Abu Dhabi. While Kolkata faced a tough 49-run loss to defending champions Mumbai Indians, the Sunrisers suffered a monumental batting collapse against Royal Challengers Bangalore, losing the game by 10 runs.

FOX NEWS: Decadent double chocolate mint cookies for National Chocolate Day National Chocolate Day on Oct. 28th calls for a serious dose of chocolate.

Decadent double chocolate mint cookies for National Chocolate Day National Chocolate Day on Oct. 28th calls for a serious dose of chocolate. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/3nEJxSB

Muni’s Equity Toolkit Helps Essential Employees Get to Work

Muni’s Equity Toolkit Helps Essential Employees Get to Work By Mariana Maguire The latest data from SFMTA’s new  Equity Toolkit  shows that Muni service changes are helping people in neighborhoods identified by our  Muni Service Equity Strategy  access more jobs and support the city’s recovery.   In winter 2020, we launched the  SFMTA Equity Toolkit  to understand how service decisions are affecting neighborhoods where there is likely a high prevalence of essential workers who rely predominantly on Muni to get to their essential jobs. Our goal is to make better service decisions based on the trends and impacts we see in the Equity Toolkit.   Recently, the greatest increases in access to jobs via Muni have been in Hunters Point and Western Addition. The Hunters Point neighborhood saw the largest gains from the addition of the  15 Bayview-Hunters Point Express , as demonstrated in the table below. Thanks to the return of key Muni lines and increased frequencies on connector routes, I

Powered Scooters Charge City’s Transportation Recovery

Powered Scooters Charge City’s Transportation Recovery By Jason Hyde The SFMTA is releasing its next round of Powered Scooter Share permits on July 1. Scooters remain a sustainable mode of travel and a complement to Muni and public transit service as the city recovers from the pandemic and San Franciscans begin to travel more. The SFMTA’s Powered Scooter Share Program is essential in ensuring that shared scooter operations support the city’s economic recovery in a safe, sustainable, and equitable way.  The SFMTA received four submittals for the permit program and will issue permits to two operators : Spin and Lime. Permits will be in effect for a one-year term, with the option to extend for another year at the discretion of the SFMTA based on compliance with various program metrics. While the new permit program does not set a limit on the number of scooters each operator may deploy, it does limit the overall citywide fleet size at 10,000. Starting at a base of 2,000 scooters per

New top story from Time: 3 Killed in Northern California as Wildfires Force Thousands to Evacuate

https://ift.tt/34at2Uy (SAN FRANCISCO) — Northern California’s wine country was on fire again Monday as strong winds fanned flames in the already scorched region, destroying homes and prompting orders for nearly 70,000 people to evacuated. Meanwhile, three people died in a separate fire further north in the state. In Sonoma County, residents of the Oakmont Gardens senior living facility in Santa Rosa boarded brightly lit city buses in the darkness overnight, some wearing bathrobes and using walkers. They wore masks to protect against the coronavirus as orange flames marked the dark sky. The fire threat forced Adventist Health St. Helena hospital to suspend care and transfer all patients elsewhere. The fires that began Sunday in the famed Napa-Sonoma wine country about 45 miles (72 kilometers) north of San Francisco came as the region nears the third anniversary of deadly wildfires that erupted in 2017, including one that killed 22 people. Just a month ago, many of those

Traffic Collisions have Decreased on San Francisco’s Slow Streets

Traffic Collisions have Decreased on San Francisco’s Slow Streets By Julia Malmo   As a whole, Slow Streets are safer than they were before being designated Slow Streets  Streets that are part of the SFMTA’s  Slow Streets Program have become measurably safer since the program began in 2020, with the number of traffic crashes falling by almost half. On average, these corridors have seen a 48% drop in collisions following their designation as Slow Streets, compared with a 14% drop in collisions citywide over the same period. Slow Streets also are more welcoming for people who walk, bike and roll. Fewer than 1,000 vehicles per day use all but four of the current Slow Streets (20th Street, Minnesota Street, Noe Street, and Page Street).  The goal of the program is to create safe, shared streets that are comfortable and enjoyable for people of all ages and abilities, using any mode of transportation. We now can see how it’s doing in a new evaluation report . When the SFMTA Board appr

New top story from Time: How History Is Repeating Itself for Haitian Migrants Trying to Enter the U.S.

https://ift.tt/3upRk9U In the past 11 years alone, Haitians have suffered natural disasters, rising gang violence, outbreaks of cholera and COVID-19, and political instability, including the recent assassination of President Jovenel Moïse . The crises left many in the hemisphere’s poorest nation feeling they had no option but to leave—despite the difficulties they face in fleeing to other countries. In late September, Americans were confronted with the reality of those difficulties too. An estimated 15,000 people arrived in Del Rio, Texas, during the month, below a bridge connecting the city to Mexico’s Ciudad Acuña. A majority were Haitian nationals, migrants and asylum seekers who ended up living in tents or under tarps, in conditions similar to those in other camps that have formed along the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Read more: Caught Between U.S. Policies and Instability at Home, Haitian Migrants in Tijuana Are in a State of L

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J कोरोना सकंट में TV सीरियल की शूटिंग शूरू, मास्क लगाकर पहुंचे स्टार्स- निया, पार्थ से लेकर रश्मि-PICS

कोरोना वायरस के चलते जारी लॉकडाउन में टीवी व फिल्मों की शूटिंग बंद थी। कोरोना के खतरे को देखते हुए तमाम सीरियल की शूटिंग रोक दी गई तो वहीं फिल्मों को रिलीज अटक गई। एंटरटेंमेंट इंडस्ट्री को कोरोना के चलते करोड़ों from टेलीविजन की खबरें | Television News in Hindi | TV Serials Update in Hindi – FilmiBeat Hindi http:/hindi.filmibeat.com/television/tv-shooting-starts-kasauti-zindagi-kay-naagin-nia-sharma-parth-samthaan-rashmi-desai-pics-090604.html?utm_source=/rss/filmibeat-hindi-television-fb.xml&utm_medium=23.11.231.156&utm_campaign=client-rss