I’ve read the transcript of the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates. That was an amazing performance, allowing Lincoln to emerge as a front runner for the 1860 presidential campaign, although the Illinois legislature still chose Douglas to the U.S. Senator after the debates were over. That was the last great debate in American politics.
I heard the first Kennedy/Nixon debate on the radio. I thought Nixon cleaned Kennedy’s clock. The people who watched it thought Kennedy won because of the way Nixon sweated, not for what he said.
When Gerald Ford debated Jimmy Carter, Ford got tangled up in the relationship of the satellite nations like Poland to the Soviet Union. Of course Ford knew the relationship, but he never recovered.
Trump said remarkably stupid things in his debates with Hillary Clinton, but he “appeared” dominant on the debate stage. People don’t listen.
I’ll admit that Biden’s performance earlier this year rightly caused people to question Biden’s mental acuity, but nobody I knew, (almost all the people I know are intelligent) said “OK, now I’m voting for Trump.”
If you have not made up your mind at this point who you will be voting for in November, you are not a good citizen and you have not done your due diligence. The debate is important only to people who are either not paying attention or are like the dogs in the movie “Up” who lose their train of thought whenever someone yells “squirrel!” I’m not watching it.
If a person is just going to lie, there's no point at all. Trump shouldn't even be interviewed unless he's told he's a liar after every statement. He makes all the media "fake news"!
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