Could the Debate Serve as a Policy Wake-up Call?

It would be a public service.

The first presidential debate of the general election will be Thursday night on CNN, and there’s been a lot of speculation (including on this website) about what will go down at it.

Will Biden hang in there mentally? Will he have a bad senior moment? Will Trump be able to control himself? Will he blow up like last time? What will be said about the last election? What will be said about January 6? Will the moderators be fair? Will the debate rules be followed?

Those are the types of questions being asked, and they’re legitimate. But it’s striking and rather telling how little analysis has gone into actual policy issues. There’s sure to be plenty of policy questions asked by CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, and I see a lot of people (especially on the right) defending their support of their respective candidate based on that individual being “better on policy,” but none of the hype leading up to the debate appears to be focused on it.

Instead, we’re talking about vibes. We’re talking about style, stamina, and conduct. I get why, of course. These candidates are so terribly flawed, and they pose such monumental concerns about their fitness to serve, that their public policy ideas have mostly been treated as an afterthought.

The polls have indicated a lot of voter discontent, not just with the parties’ presumptive nominees, but also with issues like inflation, the southern border, and abortion law. But whenever I hear the sweeping “better on policy” mantra tossed out, I’m mostly at a loss as to what such people are even talking about. I mean, I don’t think most voters thus far have much of an idea what either of these guy’s proposed solutions actually are (beyond some lame platitudes), and I can’t help but think Thursday night could serve as a very rude awakening on that front.

Take the economy, which the polls say is the top issue for Americans. Most voters have a negative view of it, assuredly due to ongoing high inflation (being that most other economic numbers are actually pretty good). I suspect most Americans have no idea why it’s been so high, and they probably don’t care. They just know that it’s been high under Biden, and it was low under Trump (which is of course a big advantage for the former president).

But what do these candidates plan to actually do about inflation? I pay pretty close attention to politics, and what politicians say, and I have no idea. What both Biden and Trump have been campaigning on so far, in regard to the economy, are measures that can only increase inflation: more government spending, more tariffs, more trade restrictions, etc.

Trump, as president, added a whopping $7.8 trillion to the national debt in a single term (the most in American history), and started a completely unnecessary trade war that increased taxes on Americans (which Trump still lies about), dramatically increased government subsidies, and raised the cost of goods and services. Biden’s been a spending maniac as well, and may end up adding even more debt than Trump. We were always going to have an inflation problem as a result of the pandemic recovery, but Biden has only worsened the matter. He even expanded Trump’s tariffs. Neither man allowed for Social Security and Medicare reforms as president, and both are promising the same profound negligence in their second term (all but guaranteeing insolvency, automatic cuts in the coming years, and a debt crisis). And as our nation continues its struggle with high inflation, both men are rhetorically doubling and tripling down on tariff expansion. Biden’s plan is terribly foolish, and Trump’s is downright economically illiterate.

In other words, if either man’s economic ideas become law, our current inflation will feel like chump change compared to what lies ahead. And at that point, inflation would be the least or our economic concerns.

Tapper and Bash will assuredly ask about inflation, and hopefully the national debt and entitlement insolvency. I really hope they bring the numbers, and are prepared, as a public service, to push back on the candidates. The same goes for other consequential policy-based issues.

As pathetic as it is that Biden and Trump are the choices the parties and primary voters have again presented us with, it would be great to use the opportunity (of millions of viewers tuning in to see a car wreck) to actually educate the public on serious policy matters that have largely been trivialized as a result of the candidates’ personal inadequacies.

Rank partisans of this political moment may not care, but responsible Americans absolutely should.