"But one man — who did not agree with the protesters — decided he would occupy the central spot. To the consternation of the others, he invited people to come talk to him one-on-one."

I wrote on March 4, 2011, in "A Free-Speech Countervoice Takes the Center of the Wisconsin Capitol Rotunda."

This interlude in the Wisconsin protests came to mind as I was thinking about the death of Charlie Kirk and what his supporters might do without him. I think there is a method of engagement with people, showing courage and openness to the exchange of ideas, that is available to everyone, and it is what this one man did in 2011.

I wrote at the time: "I started to imagine Wisconsinites coming back to the building every day, talking about everything, on and on, indefinitely into the future. That man who decided to hold dialogues in the center of the rotunda is a courageous man. But it isn't that hard to be as courageous as he was. In the long run, it's easier to do that than to spend your life intimidated and repressed. That man was showing us how to be free. He was there today, but you — and you and you! — could be there tomorrow, standing your ground, inviting people to talk to you, listening and going back and forth, for the sheer demonstration of the power of human dialogue and the preservation of freedom."

You're probably seeing some hot clips from this Hunter Biden interview.

Here's the whole fucking thing:

Go to 2:24:10 for the material about Joe Biden's disastrous debate with Trump. Snippet: "They give him Ambien to be able to sleep. He gets up on the stage and he looks like he's a deer in the headlights. And it feeds into every fucking story that anybody wants to tell, and Jake Tapper with literally how many anonymous sources. If  this was a conspiracy, Andrew, you know this, somehow the entirety of a White House in which you're literally living on top of each other has kept their mouth shut about, you know, like what and what's the conspiracy? Yeah. That Joe Biden got old. Yeah, he got old. He got old before our eyes. The people that came out against him were who? Nobody. Except speaker Pelosi. Speaker Pelosi did not give a full-throated endorsement which allowed everybody else to kind of go okay. Except who who came out full-throated? Progressives. AOC, Bernie, the entire  progressive wing."

"Former President Joe Biden’s advisers convinced the aging commander in chief to hold an early summer debate with Donald Trump last year by insisting it would allow him to reach the “widest audience possible'..."

"... a leaked memo reveals. The six-page document dated April 15, 2024 — 73 days before the disastrous forum that tanked Biden’s re-election bid — bizarrely capitalizes and bolds any references to the 46th president. 'By holding the first debate in the spring, YOU will be able to reach the widest audience possible, before we are deep in the summer months with the conventions, Olympics, and family vacations taking precedence,” reads the memo.... 'In addition, the earlier YOU are able to debate the better, so that the American people can see YOU standing next to Trump and showing the strength of YOUR leadership, compared to Trump’s weakness and chaos,' it continues...."

I'm reading "Biden advisers pushed early Trump debate to reach ‘widest audience possible,’ leaked memo reveals" (NY Post).

The bold and capitalized YOU and YOUR looks like something from a scammy advertisement aiming to separate weak-minded seniors from their life savings.

I don't for one minute believe the advisers believed the assertions in the memo. I will be presuming that they could see he was going to be incapable of appearing competent and that they needed to push him to release his hold on the nomination, and they only wanted to do that once the primaries were over and it was too late to do anything but advance Kamala Harris. So they conned him into humiliating himself in the debate and giving the media the basis for declaring him unfit — as if they just noticed — and demanding that he withdraw.

The advisers were not mistaken. They knew what they were doing. They were lying. And they were devious. Let me restate that. THEY knew what THEY were doing. THEY were lying. And THEY were devious.

That's my presumption. Prove me wrong.

How is Gavin Newsom in debates?

I wondered, reading this quote from Newsom: "Since you’re so eager to talk about me, how about saying it to my face. Let’s debate. Time and place?"

He wrote that on X, and I'm reading it this morning in "Vance Blames L.A. Violence on California Democrats and Disparages Padilla/Vice President JD Vance said during a Los Angeles stop that Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass had encouraged protesters to engage in violence. He also criticized Senator Alex Padilla and called him by the wrong name" (NYT).

Maybe Vance should take Newsom up on that offer. It would focus attention on the administration's arguments. It's not as if the Vice President would have to go on to other debates with other other opponents on all sorts of issues. This is the Governor of California, and immigration enforcement and opposition to it are centered in California. This could be a unique debate.

How would the debate go? I asked Grok to compare the debating skill of the 2 men and to predict the outcome: here. (NOTE: bad link is fixed).

Please think it through before taking my poll:

Should Vance take up Newsom's challenge and debate?

Yes

No

 

pollcode.com free polls

The Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates debate.

The difference between these Susan Crawford and Brad Schimel is sharply defined.

AND: Here's a new NYT article, "The Trump Loyalist Aiming to Swing Wisconsin Back to the Right/Brad Schimel, a judge who is so supportive of the president that he dressed up as him for Halloween, is hoping to flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court for conservatives":

The state’s Democratic Party is airing television ads tying Mr. Musk to Judge Schimel....

Click that link to see an ad that shows Elon Musk wielding the chain saw and giving the "Nazi" salute over and over again.

"Pilloried by Democrats during his 2012 run, Romney has emerged as a strong voice for a bygone kind of politics."

Said Jake Tapper, introducing Mitt Romney on "State of the Union" yesterday.

Romney gave a long interview, and maybe you saw a clip of it, but I want to do my own edit:

ROMNEY: Donald Trump won. He won overwhelmingly. He said what he was going to do, and that's what he's doing. I mean, people are saying, oh, I don't like this appointment or this policy that he's talking about. But those are the things he said he was going to do when he ran. So you can't complain about someone who does what he said he was going to do. And I agree with him on a lot of policy fronts. I disagree with him on some things. But it's like, OK, give him a chance to do what he said he's going to do and see how it works out.... 

TAPPER:  Are you worried at all about being a target for retribution, you or members of your family?

ROMNEY: No, actually, I have been pretty clean throughout my life. I'm not particularly worried about criminal investigations.

NYT opinion columnist M. Gessen displays shockingly little concern for free-speech values...

... in the podcast "The Real Loser of the V.P. Debate/It’s our politics": 

I think we need a harm reduction philosophy of covering Trump and his party and the election. And these are some things to consider: One is to cut his or Vance’s mic when they start lying.

So not only is censorship the go-to remedy, but it's one-sided — openly one-sided.  

And I know this is a hugely controversial idea, and it’s usually controversial because it will enable them to scream censorship, but there needs to be a philosophy of journalism that is oriented toward the public good.

That is, Gessen has thought through the censorship problem and determined that "harm reduction" or "the public good" supervenes the free flow of ideas to the people and allowing us to choose what we like. Gesson seems to object even to the speech that is objecting to the suppression of speech — to the "them" who "scream censorship."

When I talk to my students about it...

Gessen teaches journalism at the City University of New York.

I always say: Imagine that information is water and some of the water is poisoned.

How is speech like water? Speech comes from a human mind. And when is speech "information"? When it is truth? Poison is not water, but an additional substance tainting the water. Lies and mistakes in speech are not like poison in water. How would you go about purifying speech and turning it into "information"? The traditional American ideology is that the way to get to the truth is to have a free flow of words — a marketplace of ideas — and to let people read and hear and think and have their own discussions about what is true. How could you possibly know the truth in advance and deliver it to the people? 

But Gessen pushes on with the analogy, which has been tested in the CUNY classroom:

And if you are tasked with conveying the water to the public...

So a censor is posited at the outset. 

... it would be a crime for you to convey poisoned water.

The censor is presumed to have the capacity to tell truth from lies. And the government is visualized as having the power to criminalize speech.

And I think that political lies, lies in the public sphere, are just as poisonous to our politics as poisoned water is to humans. And if we think of ourselves as conveyors, as mediators, as media, who transport this information, this water, then we have this abiding responsibility to do something about it. We can’t just turn to one of the candidates and say, “I’d like to see you take a sip of that. And see what happens to you.”

So one idea is to turn off the microphone when the disfavored candidate is deemed to be lying. But that is not all. Gessen continues:

I think we also need to figure out ways to contextualize the candidates. Certainly, this two-minute-per-person debate format is not conducive to creating nuanced or contextualized pictures.

Ah! Nuance! Context! I have tags for "nuance" and "context." I love when that happens. A chime goes off in my blogger brain. But back to Gessen:

But what if we had a different format? What if journalists prepared fact-based reports to create context for the debate? Who said that the debate absolutely has to be broadcast live? If we have one person who is lying in the debate, maybe that’s not the best possible format.

If you increase the power of the journalists who are known to disfavor one of the candidates, why would that person agree to debate? There are so many other outlets for free speech. The water overflows its once-solid banks and floods where it will. Now where is your fantasy of control?

"At one point, Vance wanted to correct something about how Haitians got into this country — and he was RIGHT...."

Muted mics were only supposed to be used if things went off the rails. But this was a civil policy back and forth about what voters say is the most or second most important issue in this election! We can't have debating in a debate! Shut up now! https://t.co/aC69URTs9O

— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) October 2, 2024

"... I’ve written pretty harshly about Vance.... But I thought he actually did himself and his ticket some good."

"Vance came into this debate with a mission, which was to make himself and his running mate seem more reasonable, less extreme and more respectful of women. He knew exactly what he wanted to achieve, and he was just really good at it. He calibrated his tone really shrewdly. Whereas, I don’t think Walz had an objective other than to answer the questions and talk a lot about Minnesota.... He didn’t seem to want to achieve any one main thing, and so he didn’t really achieve much of anything, other than to do no harm.... And I was very surprised that Walz didn’t... point to the pretty extreme things Vance has said about women. I guess he was waiting for the moderators to do it. But the first half-hour of a debate is when viewers are really locked in, and Vance has a serious vulnerability there. I think I would have made that my main objective. The phrase 'cat ladies' never even came up."

Says Matt Bai, in "Did Tim Walz miss a crucial moment at the VP debate? The governor didn’t seem to have a clear objective in his face-off with Republican JD Vance." That's a free-access link, so you can read the whole conversation Bai has with Megan McArdle and Gene Robinson.

At one point, Megan McArdle talks about watching the debate with the sound off. Vance looked "much more composed." What Matt Bai noticed with the sound off was "how deeply concerned Walz looked about everything, as if he feared bad news." Which is basically the same point. McArdle asks "At a visceral level, who wants a president who looks anxious?"

I did the opposite mostly. I watched without looking at them.

It felt like an imitation of Kamala Harris's "I grew up a middle-class kid" — Tim Walz began his answer with "I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, town of 400."

The moderator, Margaret Brennan, purporting to delve into "personal qualifications" — that is, character — asked Tim Walz to explain why he said he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests when, in fact, he was not.

Here's the transcript of the full debate. Walz answered:

Well, and to the folks out there who didn't get at the top of this, look...

That "look" makes me feel as though I'm being chastised for not paying attention. Am I one of the "the folks out there who didn't get at the top of this"? What does that even mean? "At the top of" what? "Get at the top"? Did he mean those who didn't watch — get in on — the debate from the beginning? Anyway, that sets up this:

... I grew up in small, rural Nebraska, town of 400. Town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the streetlights come on, and I'm proud of that service.

That's like Harris's "grew up in the middle-class" safe space. Instead of answering the question asked, he goes back to a snapshot of his youth. Somehow he's "proud of that service." The service of riding your bike around until it got dark. Much as I'd love to see the kids of America riding their bikes around and I'd be willing to regard them as performing a "service" if it would help, Tim Walz was just deflecting the question and doing so in a way that reminded me of all the times Harris deflected questions by directing us toward a picture of her as a child. Walz's picture is at least a happy one.

Let's talk about the Vice Presidential Debate.

I'll probably refrain from saying anything until tomorrow, so please keep the conversation going in the comments.

"The debate has been a source of anxiety for Walz, according to people close to him..."

"... who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss his private mood. Walz conceded to Harris when she was evaluating him as a potential running mate that he was not an experienced debater, the people said, adding that he is concerned about letting the campaign down on Tuesday night. Asked shortly after the Harris-Trump debate whether he had started thinking about his own meeting with Vance, Walz said he had. 'Yes, I need to,' he told MSNBC. 'Look, he’s Yale Law guy. I’m a public school teacher. So we know where he’s at on that.'"

The Washington Post sets the expectations low, in "Vance and Walz face contrasting pressures in much-anticipated debate/For Vance, Trump may be his most important viewer. For Walz, the task of introducing himself to voters looms large."

The hope seems to be that Walz can win on likability. We're told that "Some Democrats are less concerned" about Walz's lack of thinking/speaking ability, because "Walz is far more popular than Vance." The public school teacher would like to make the young guy seem like the nerd that "popular" kids shun? If that's a debate strategy, I hope to detect it in real time. 

I like the "probably" in this sentence:

"Trump on Saturday argued it was 'too late' to have another presidential debate because Americans have begun casting their ballots in the 2024 election...."

"Trump suggested last week that he might be open to participating in a third presidential debate.... 'Maybe if I got in the right mood,' he told reporters during a stop in California, after previously postingon Truth Social, 'THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!'... Harris’ campaign last week dismissed Trump’s announcement that there would not be another debate, with one senior adviser saying the former president 'changes his position every day.'..."

From "Harris accepts CNN debate invitation for October 23, again challenging Trump to another showdown" (CNN).

I assume he's negotiating. But it is getting late. And yet October 23 seems too late because too many people will have already voted. Don't we all need to be reacting to the same information? Maybe not. Why does it seem as though we should? Am I just nostalgic for the days when we all — except the overseas military and the truly housebound — trudged to the polls and waited in line together?

"Harris Had Stronger Debate, Polls Find, but the Race Remains Deadlocked."

 The NYT reports, just now. Free-access link.

ADDED: 2 interesting highlights:

1. "The share of voters who said they still wanted to learn more about Ms. Harris was nearly identical, both before and after the debate, suggesting that she might have missed an opportunity to address doubts or provide more details to the public....:

2. "[F]ar more voters see [Harris] as too liberal than view Mr. Trump as too conservative.... Mr. Trump took the title as the more 'extreme' candidate, 74 percent versus 46 percent.Yet being extreme was not viewed negatively by many voters. In fact, Mr. Trump won the group of voters who said 'extreme' described him 'somewhat well' by more than 50 percentage points...."

AND: Those 2 points fit together. Do you see how? Harris is trying to look moderate, but that makes people feel they don't know enough. If she's extreme, we're not seeing it so much. Trump is more revealing, so he seems more extreme. People feel they know what he's saying, and a lot of them like it.

"Former President Donald J. Trump declared on Thursday that he would not debate Vice President Kamala Harris again...."

"'Because we’ve done two debates and because they were successful, there will be no third debate,' he said at the [Tucson] rally, counting his debate against President Biden in June as the first one...."

I'm reading "Election Live Updates: Trump Says He Won’t Do Another Debate as Harris Announces Cash Haul" (NYT).

Is he negotiating?

"When two fighters fight and one loses, the first thing they do is ask for a debate. Or they ask for a fight. So in this case a debate."

"When a fighter loses, he says: "I want a rematch. I want a rematch." Always the losing person, the fighter, the debater, they always ask for a rematch."

Said Trump, quoted in "Will There Be Another Debate? Trump Isn’t Sure. The former president suggested immediately after the debate and in a call-in to Fox News on Wednesday morning that he was not inclined to agree to another" (NYT).

Immediately after the debate, Harris's campaign said, "Vice President Harris is ready for a second debate. Is Donald Trump?"

Being "ready" for a rematch isn't the exactly the same thing as demanding a rematch. I assume both sides are spinning the first debate by saying things about a possible second debate, and they are in the middle of negotiating the terms and generating new material to use to insult each other. 

Will the debate be balanced, sedate, and unimportant? Or is something exciting about to happen?

Let's watch together and talk about it here.

1. My son John is live-blogging at Facebook.

2. ...

"Some scholars have been surprised by their findings about gender and how candidates translate to viewers."

"One experiment enlisted actors to re-create a Clinton-Trump debate — repeating lines, gestures and facial expressions but with the genders swapped. Audience members were asked about their views afterward.... 'That project was really shocking for me,' said Joe Salvatore, a New York University professor who co-led the experimental performance. He had thought that viewers would react more negatively to a female Trump and more positively to a male Clinton because of gender bias — for instance, an aversion to a confrontational woman. But plenty liked that the female Trump was 'strong' and 'concise' — and conversely took issue with how much the male Clinton was smiling."

From "Analysts say Trump faces risks heightened by gender when he debates Harris/Political analysts say there are particular risks for Donald Trump — heightened by gender — in coming across as a bully when he debates Kamala Harris" (WaPo).

I blogged about Salvatore's project back in 2017 — with video of the gender-reversed debate. What a revelation! Watch:

I think it's great that the audience appreciated a woman talking like Trump and didn't like the Hillary mannerisms in a man. And Kamala Harris has a lot of feminine style that I'm afraid comes across as subordinate: the laughing, the smiling, the whole-body shaking, the nodding of the head as if desperate for approval, the ever-changing voice. It doesn't show leadership ability, and we can see why Trump is getting mileage out of saying that world leaders will "walk all over her" and "She'll be like a play toy."

"In February 2023, the New York Times published an article titled, 'Kamala Harris Is Trying to Define Her Vice Presidency. Even Her Allies Are Tired of Waiting.'"

"The headline was generous, given what followed. 'The painful reality for Ms. Harris is that in private conversations over the last few months, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and around the nation … said [Harris] had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country,' the New York Times reported. 'Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.'... [T]he New York Times reported that 'a quiet panic' had 'set in among key Democrats about what would happen if President Biden opted not to run for a second term.' Harris made the situation even worse by retreating to 'a bunker' for about a year, the New York Times said, 'after her disastrous interview with Lester Holt of NBC News.'..."

Writes Byron York, in "Remember when Democrats (and everybody else) thought Kamala Harris was a bad vice president?" (Washington Examiner). Discussion of other articles at the link and the statement that "there were many more, all of which could be summarized by one, brief sentence: Kamala Harris made a mess of the vice presidency."

These days, the press have tried to boost Harris, but even though they seem to want to help her, she's avoiding them. As for the NYT, it's still musing about Harris's need to "define" herself. There's this, from "Harris Says She’s Ready for Debate as Poll Shows a Tight Race: Election Updates":

"It’s the stuff of #Resistance dreams: Kamala Harris, the prosecutor, gets onstage in Philadelphia next Tuesday across from Donald Trump, the felon, and proceeds to brutally expose him..."

"... as a racist and sexist con man who’s been lying to the American people ever since his famous escalator ride nine years ago. Only that’s not how she or her debate-prep team sees her main objective for the debate — at all. In mock-debate sessions in Pittsburgh, planning meetings in Washington, and briefing-book cram sessions between public events on the campaign trail, the vice-president and her aides have kept much of their focus on fine-tuning ways to keep presenting her as representative of a new political era for the benefit of curious voters who are still interested in learning more about her — and who may swing the race come November... 'She’s not known in the way Donald Trump is,' says one senior Democrat who used to work for Joe Biden and is now close to the Harris campaign’s leaders. 'It’s an opportunity to define herself....'"

Writes Gabriel Debenedetti, in "Why Kamala Isn’t Preparing to Knock Out Trump at the Debate/To her campaign, something else is more important" (NY Magazine).