Why Joe Biden should be hungry to debate Donald Trump

By all accounts, including his own, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is excited to debate Donald Trump one-on-one in Cleveland later this month.

As he should be.

The three presidential debates represent Mr Biden’s only opportunities to directly and immediately confront any lie or intentional mischaracterisation Mr Trump makes about their records — from their plans to tackle the coronavirus pandemic and positions on policing reform, to what each has said about police brutality and the pockets of violence on the streets of several US cities this summer.

“I don’t see why this is really even a question. Anyone with any self-respect who’s had as many lies told about them as Biden has would run through a wall for the opportunity to go at Trump one-on-one,” one veteran Democratic strategist told The Independent, a sentiment shared by several others in Democratic circles in Washington.

Mr Biden cannot rely solely on the media to fact check Mr Trump for the simple reason that Americans don’t trust the so-called fourth estate as a fair arbiter of truth. (Walter Cronkite has been dead for over a decade.)

The former vice president seems aware of that, and has vowed to be a “fact checker on the floor” against the president.

He’s been preparing for the showdown for weeks, his campaign has said, and he ought to have memorised rapid-fire rebuttals to the president’s greatest hits:

“Biden wants to defund the police.” (He doesn’t. In fact, he wants more funding for police departments.)

“Biden wants to have open borders.” (Again, not true.)

“Biden corruptly pressured Ukraine to fire a government prosecutor investigating the gas company, Burisma, on whose board Biden’s son Hunter sat.” (Couple of things: 1) That prosecutor, Victor Shokin, was ousted after intense pressure from a bipartisan [read: Democrats and Republicans] and multilateral Western coalition accusing him of protecting his corrupt cronies. 2) The Burisma investigation’s subject matter predated Hunter Biden’s tenure at the company.)

Anyone who has been accused of such falsehoods ought to be champing at the bit to challenge the president on these and other cakes of unfounded muddy conjecture.

“I can hardly wait,” Mr Biden said of the debates, with a grin, in a late-August interview with ABC News.

Of course there’s the camp of Democratic elites who have urged Mr Biden not to even bother with Mr Trump.

“It's a fool's errand to enter the ring with someone who can't follow the rules or the truth,” veteran Democratic strategist and Clinton White House spokesman Joe Lockhart has argued over at CNN.

But Mr Lockhart’s commentary confuses Mr Biden’s predicament with a binary choice of letting Mr Trump comment amok at the debates or skipping them altogether.

Mr Biden can join Mr Trump on stage and refuse to play by his rules. He doesn’t have to debate the president within his narrow framework of facts and falsehoods.

The debates allow Mr Biden to define what the truth really is about his plans for the country on the pandemic, law enforcement, and an economic rebound — that is, to provide a vision of America that diverges from Trump World’s alternate reality of murderous brigades of “Antifa” lefties threatening suburbanites’ guns, parks, and Wal-Marts.

He’ll have minutes at a time to state his case to the TV cameras in direct rebuttal. If his campaign team were really on the ball, another Democratic strategist who is not working directly for Mr Biden told The Independent, they’d be preparing a web page of “footnotes” the vice president can refer viewers to about what he has said on certain issues, an anticipatory “fact-checking landing spot, if you will,” to counter all of Mr Trump’s favourite lines of attack.

Last week, the Biden campaign respectfully swatted down Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plea for Mr Biden to skip the debates so as not to “legitimize a conversation with [Trump]” on account of the president’s penchant for spurning “truth, evidence, data and facts.”

Um, Earth to Madam Speaker: He’s the president of the United States, a position that comes with a presumed air of legitimacy and import. The occupant of the White House, the executor of US policy, cannot simply be ignored.

The fact is that 40(ish) per cent of American voters already take Mr Trump’s word as truth, consuming the same set of facts from Fox News and online conservative punditry as he does.

More importantly, millions of the crucial 10 percent of undecided voters — disproportionately concentrated in swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — still hold out on the possibility of legitimising his administration for another four years, polling last month found.

That undecided cohort represents a smaller percentage of the voting populace than it has in previous presidential cycles, but it’s still a significant chunk.

Mr Biden’s mere presence at the debates doesn’t somehow automatically legitimise the 20,055 (by The Washington Post’s latest count) wrong or misleading claims Mr Trump has told over the last three and a half years — they offer a decisive opportunity on the nation’s biggest stage for Mr Biden to directly confront, and in fact de-legitimise, in real time, everything the president has said.

If he prepares for the debates correctly, Mr Biden can put Mr Trump’s authority on trial.