By Pamela E. Ice ©
Special to the Garland Journal
President Joe Biden and Donald Trump were on the same debate stage June 27, but they were not participating in the same debate.
President Biden came to his lectern to answer the questions from the moderators for all the American people; Trump went to his lectern to score talking points with his base.
While the President worked to craft cogent responses to the questions, Trump flung out stale lies which seldom addressed the questions at hand.
On the one hand, Trump did not come off as unhinged – a real accomplishment for him – he just came off as the lying liar he is. Rarely did he seem to think about his responses; he didn’t have to because he had a script in his head that had nothing to do with the questions CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash asked the debaters.
On the other hand, the President had a less than good night and seemed less on the ball than the Dems and I would have liked. But for Democrats to talk about asking him to step off the ticket is not only premature; it is too late for that. The election is less than five months away.
The President and the Demo- crats are going to have to stay the course. Joe Biden is the incumbent, the Democratic nominee. It’s a fact everyone must live with. Let’s face it, to some Trump may have seemed better prepared than the President but he really wasn’t, because he didn’t come to debate, he came to pound his acolytes with his favorite lies.
And when asked if he would accept the results of this November ‘s presidential election, Trump, who was asked the question three separate times, never said, “Yes.”
As to the President’s performance, he did not have a stellar debate night. Though he marshaled and shared a huge amount of information with the American people, a couple of times he had trouble using his two minutes he was sometimes hard to understand, and he was ineffective in swatting down Trump’s lies or Trump’s failure to respond to most of the questions.
What I ask you to remember is this: Barack Obama had a poor first debate with Mitt Romney, but he aced the subsequent debate, and he won the election that November.
So, Democrats need to pull themselves together and worry about getting out the vote. The sky is not falling after all! Joe just had a bad night.
Pamela E. Ice is an essayist, cultural commentator, and blogger in Oak Cliff, Dallas TX. A graduate of Fisk University (BA) and the University of Texas, Arlington (MA), Pamela is a Dallas College (North Lake) professor emerita and she can be reached at iceink@prodigy.net
