On performance art – Edward-Isaac Dovere in The Atlantic:

‘Conventional wisdom has set in that the opening minutes of the first debate will be the most important. But many Democrats will be holding their breath all the way through the final seconds of the third debate, on October 22. Biden’s stumbles tend to come after he’s been under pressure for long stretches, such as in last September’s primary debate, when he said late in the evening that children should improve their vocabulary by sitting with a record player, or when he snapped at the end of a radio interview in May that “you ain’t Black” if you don’t support him.
Biden’s closest aides aren’t particularly nervous. They viewed the primary debates as necessary to attend but essentially irrelevant to the race, and they feel the same way now. If elections were won by following debate-club rules, Clinton would be the president and Elizabeth Warren would be the 2020 Democratic nominee.’

(…)

‘The biggest X factor, as always with debates, is the media coverage, which will shape people’s perceptions of the contest. Thousands of Americans are dying each week during the pandemic, millions are out of work or are about to be, cataclysmic fires and storms are hammering the country, and violent clashes have broken out in some places. With Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, the Supreme Court’s future is now uncertain. And Biden and Trump don’t know each other at all. They met only once, at Trump’s inauguration, and haven’t spoken other than a brief performance-art phone call in the spring, when they were supposedly trying to work together to fight the pandemic. Going at each other face-to-face shakes up the dynamics for any candidate.’

(…)

‘Maybe America’s obsession with presidential debates is pointless. For all those endless hours of the 10 primary debates, nothing happened onstage that affected the actual dynamics of the race for more than a few minutes. There is only one memorable moment: when Kamala Harris garroted Biden over busing, and seemed on the verge of destroying his campaign. But even that didn’t change the result; that’s his name on the campaign logo, and hers underneath.’

Read the article here.

Are Americans really obsessed with the debates? I wouldn’t say so.

Indeed, unless huge mistakes are being made the debates won’t change much. The current president claimed that he could get away with murder at noon on 5th Avenue, yes, probably he could, it’s a slight exaggeration but only slight. So, what on earth could he do wrong during the debates? Maybe his voters wouldn’t like it when he asked for forgiveness during the debate, but even about that I’m not so sure. The sinner as messiah remains a popular idea.

Biden might stumble, but he stumbled in the past, and as this article points out, it didn’t harm his campaign at all.

Unless the performance art turns out to be high art the debates will be a distraction.
Democracy itself turned out to be merely a distraction, but a distraction worth defending.