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This line going around today feels like a motte-rat ingroup circle-jerk. Other people are superficial, but we focus on the real substance! It's a presidential debate, there is little substance, the words have always been made-up and meaningless. Does Biden debate Trump to a draw because, although he looked horrible, and although nobody is persuaded by anything he said, he did manage to say things? I feel as though people have always been a little disingenuous about debates. Everyone pretends that there is a reified debate format, where people say things like, "Well, Biden's answer doesn't convince me, but it's an objectively-strong argument and might move somebody else." But there is no imaginary modal voter. There are not actually rules for deciding who won. It becomes an exercise in imaginary terms that nobody is actually thinking in, but everyone assumes everyone else is thinking in. This is all a little too self-congratulatory for me.
Nobody is impressed with the substance of Biden's answers. Nobody even really cares what they were. Obviously, we all already know what Biden's policies are and what his candidacy means. For that matter, nobody cares what the substance of Trump's answers was either. It's an intellectual exercise. I don't care what Trump did on January 6th, you do care what Trump did on January 6th, so does anybody care that Trump gave this answer instead of that answer? Is there some hypothetical voter who does?
The style is much more important. Bring back the smashing and yelling and interrupting and crass. I actually want to see Trump walk all over the other guy kicking and fighting. Show me that Jeb actually can't stand up for himself when called out and attacked. Give me the Hillary who glowers but doesn't back down. What did Andrew Yang say in the first 2020 debate that showed how impressive his policy credentials were? Who even knows. I do remember Chris Christie decimating Marco Rubio over repeating the same canned stock phrase on three separate occasions. I don't remember a damned policy argument Amy Klobuchar ever made, just that she was boring, and uninspiring, and lacking the actual qualities of a leader.
Imagine how boring politics would be if we all went back to this frame: Biden tied Trump because, when you strip away how he spoke, how he looked, how he stood, how he argued, and how he lead, his stock canned prepared statements were just as technically sensible as Trump's, or maybe better. No, Biden lost, because he looked like an old man who didn't even know what room he was in. He froze up. He couldn't get the words out. He made uncomfortable faces when he wasn't speaking. He sometimes didn't know what he was saying. He looked old. Trump lightly bullied him and except for a few moments he couldn't fight back. This is how politics works, this is literally what matters. The motte-rat insistence on some sort of Nixon-Kennedy radio interpretation of disembodied words floating in space actually feels deeply anti-rational, because it is obviously not how things work. Nobody cares. The exercise in imagining that we can care about "the words that are said" but also imagine the mindset of "the average voter" is vanity. No!, actually. Those things literally do not exist. They are endless rationalizations. If you live in this plane of unreality, you could completely swap Trump and Biden's policies and ideas and visions, and it wouldn't matter.
Thinking about these policy wonk ideas isn't a more elevated form of politics stripped from emotion and chance. It's actually a degeneration. Because this is what people care about. A robot could make the words, it's the emotions that count.
Maybe the folks here do, because we're all policy wonks ignorant of politics. But I've run into people in the wake of the 2016 election who didn't know what Clinton's position was on opioids, or on Appalachian economic development, or on climate policy, or on Net Neutrality.
This is enough of a problem that if you explain Republican policies in a reasonably objective way to people, they'll frequently think that you're making things up, because of course no one would do something that evil. (Example, example, example.)
The modal voter isn't nearly as well-informed as you seem to think they are. I don't know to what extent the debates would inform them on policy (I've written elsewhere on the potential value of the format), but the starting place isn't where you're describing it.
Matt Yglesias. Data for Progess. Vox.
Dude....Sources matter.
You may be right to dismiss biased sources. But you’ve got to put in the effort instead of skipping to dismissal. Make your objections clear so that other people can engage with them.
Okay. Fair.
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Yes, but the contents also matter, and this is just lazy of you. Who do you think is going to write about this sort of thing? The right?
Yglesias is pointing out that the stated positions of conservative interest groups (e.g., no abortion even in cases of rape our incest) are sometimes really unpopular (per Gallup polls quoted by the FRC), and conservative politicians have become quite good at tiptoeing around this.
DFP did some surveys that discovered that Republicans specifically had some weird ideas about the party's platform; a majority thought they had a healthcare plan that would protect people with pre-existing conditions and opposes the rollback of certain environmental protection rules, nearly half thinks they want to expand Medicaid. These are all wrong. People don't know the party's platform.
The Vox article involved Sarah Kliff interviewing a lot of people who had lost their healthcare under Republican policies, who said things like:
Or:
What part of this do you think is fake or misleading? A significant portion of voters don't know their party's platform, and won't believe it if you tell them because it sounds bad.
True, but he's told but half the tale. As Trump accurately pointed out on stage (to little fanfare) Biden, and the mainstream (not even progressive) Democratic position is that abortion should be legal at all points of the pregnancy, even during labor of a viable fetus. Even "borne alive" bills cant get DNC votes (although Ill admit I think this bill is unconstitutional, as would be all federal abortion bills, but that obviously doesn't factor in the voting for your average Democrat given they voted for the one above). The extreme left position seems to be something like a child acquires the right to life some unspecified time after leaving the womb, but will not specify that amount of time, and it is much longer than 1 second.
I don't think there's the symmetry you think there is. Institutions on the right are specifically very keen on women in those circumstances carrying to term.
On the left, it's not so much the idea that women in the 40th week can and should and would just change their minds like that, but rather that in situations like, say, this one, having the heavy hand of the government involved will just make things worse. And that narrowly written exceptions don't actually help, given situations like this.
The idea is, if I understand correctly, that the heavy hand of the law will just make things worse, because the Shirley exception is not an actual usable piece of law.
I think that the first half of your post is the very charitable explanation that I think is false for the majority.
And that Shirley exception post is like, one of the worst examples of deceptive argumentation I've ever seen and is a rebuttal of an argument I've never seen.
Sorry, can you be clearer about what you think is "false for the majority"?
I understand that you may not have seen that precise argument... but it's in the quotes upthread. “You can’t get rid of it.” “I guess I thought that, you know, he would not do this, he would not take health insurance away knowing it would affect so many peoples lives." Surely this bad thing can't actually happen.
As it's written:
There absolutely is disbelief that awful things could actually happen; you see it everywhere. Surely it won't be that bad. Surely people will be reasonable. Surely it will work out for the best.
I think you're being overly narrow in what you think of as The Shirley Exception.
This. I think they just really like abortion and the idea that a woman can change her mind about child rearing at any time.
I dont encounter this in real life. This is just a weaponization of womans tears argument. People intrinsically know hurting some people is almost always going to happen for anytime you make an optimal policy. These tears are why destructive policies like medicare and medicaid almost never get dismantled. We operate in the opposite environment than "The Shirley Exception", we live in the tear win almost always world. Even though tears are almost always wrong.
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Your comment is highly voted, but attacking a strawman argument that doesn't truly exist. Everyone, and I mean almost literally everyone, including here, knows that debates are only important for two things. Media reactions, including maybe a few clips, and the narrative it sometimes establishes; and the impact on swing voters. That's it! That's the whole list! And swing voters are well known to decide things on vibes and gut feelings and impressions. Also not new news.
Partisan or pre-decided viewers, who we all know are not the target audience, have different feelings. That's what will show up in a number of formats, because they are the people writing many of these opinions, and virtually everyone likes to hear themselves talk.
We are in the latter category almost all of us, the ones who want to talk. We are discussing the debate because it is fun. At least on some level! And virtually everyone in this thread agrees about the fundamental points about what actual swing voters probably thought. So I'm not too impressed by a rant against people who basically don't exist, and don't understand the hostility against "motte-rats", because I was under the impression that we all know how much of a bubble this place is, and use it as some form of entertainment or vague intellectual hobbyism? Or are you not aware of this?
That argument is a strawman, the real argument is [the same argument].
There are plenty of posters in this thread arguing that Biden might have looked old, but he still won because blarglemumkas. Likewise, I watched the debate with (conservative) friends who said things like, "That argument doesn't work on me, but I bet it plays great with normies!" These are all rationalizations. I want to remove the word "normie" from our vocabulary. I want to stop analyzing how some hypothetical person who doesn't exist might have reasoned. (To the extent that "normies" exist, they reason in a million idiosyncratic and personal ways.)
My position is that this substance is style, that these political facts-and-figures arguments are not real, that discussing these things are an empty trap. It doesn't matter what Biden (or Trump) said as much as how he said it: the substance is style, the style is the real substance. I think much of the discussion here is focused on the wrong half of the debate. I think it's masturbatory. And I'm not impressed by the argument that, of course it's jerking off, that's what we're here for.
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For those who still don't realize SlowBoy is correct, read Parable of the Dagger until you are enlightened.
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I usually stay out of political discussions but I want to endorse this stance on all counts. Imho the very essence of presidential debates is pitting two directly opposed people against each other and watch them sink or swim in a marginally-less-scripted-than-usual environment. It's pure PR/show business, entirely driven by the personalities of the debaters. If you're reading it, it's not for you. I agree that watching debates for thoughtful policy takes is like watching porn for the plot - I will concede that sometimes you need a convoluted narrative to really get off, but I will dare say that is not the actual point. At least the faintest semblance of passion is absolutely vital, have people forgotten why they call red/blue tribes tribes?
Additionally, style/memes/whatever you call a winning scenario in debates is literally all that matters with non-Americans - strictly speaking this show is domestic audience only, and Americans are under no obligations to give a shit about how they look from outside, but it's current_year+8 and like it or not everyone is watching. At risk of invoking "whomst inquired", I will cast my vote as a filthy second-world pleb and say the 2024 season so far is fucking boring. Not that the others weren't - if you ambushed me on my walk home and demanded at gunpoint to recite a crumb of Hillary's proposed policy or a single meme of the Blue campaign circa 2016, I would've just resigned to getting shot. At least with Reds I can shout LOCK HER UP and make a run for it. Memes matter. {russell: Passion|Belligerence|Hostility} matters. You can be annoyed that this is what gets lodged inside the normies' unconscious id, sure, would you be surprised to know normies don't watch porn for the plot either?
Maybe I'm not online enough but what does current_year+8 mean and what is "whomst inquired", and what is a second-world person?
The 8th year of the Permanent Current Year of 2016, I think.
2015 is Current Year, so we're in Current Year + 9 at the moment
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"Current Year" started as a meme on places like 4chan. It was observed that a common specious argument would go something like: "You don't support gay marriage? But it's 2014!" "How could you not have socialized healthcare? It's 2015?" The idea was that people were advancing incredulity and consensus instead of an actual argument. After a few years of this argument being popular, it became mocked in the phrase, "It's current year!"
After Trump's election in 2016 and the shock that engendered, it became common for some people to refer to the year 2016 as "Current Year." With the implication that we never mentally left the shock of those events.
"Whomst inquired" is a specific instantiation of a more general meme that essentially made fun of the word "Whom". First you have "who," then in more formal contexts you use "whom," so, obviously, there must be "whomst," "whomst'd," "whomst'd've," and so on down the line. "Whomst inquired" is a whimsical way of saying, "Who asked," i.e., "nobody asked for this but..."
"Second-world person" has a few different meanings because it doesn't exactly have any meaning anymore. It sits between "first-world" and "third-world," and is a leftover term from the Cold War. (US and its allies were first-world, Soviets and its allies were second-world, the non-aligned world was third-world, which is also sometimes a synonym for the world's shitholes.)) In this case, it means he's not an American.
Thank you for the detailed and accurate summation. I really do appreciate it!
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I'm guessing current_year+8 refers to 2016, where the election of Trump broke the brains of the American left. But I thought the eternal current_year began in 2014, when the culture war really started to take off in its current iteration.
I thought it started in 2015 with Justin Trudeau's election. When he was questioned about the diversity of his cabinet he answered "Because it's 2015?" and that got memed into all sorts of "Because it's current year?" nemes and when 2016 came around it became current year + 1.
Edit: looks like the earliest known instance of the meme is from 2014, but it became a popular meme in 2015 making fun of John Oliver (and later Trudeau). So 2024 is current year + 9 for standard usage of the meme:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/come-on-its-2015-current-year
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I think a reified debate format is possible. Take this interview:
https://youtube.com/watch?si=zc3iAibHgxxf6gir&v=fPQ9uA_M1Eg&feature=youtu.be
In it, Tucker Carlson pushes back against a member of the media who said that Tucker's head was in the sand about the Assad regime being responsible for gas attacks. Carlson comes off increasingly hysterical as the debate goes on, as the media member stays calm and lands good points. That sort of debate is absolutely possible, if Biden behaved like that guy and had cool and factual responses to Trump, he could've knocked it out of the park. Instead, Biden flubbered on abortion that should've been an easy popular issue for him, and didn't press Trump on stuff like Ukraine that he has no plan for beyond asking Putin to pretty please stop the war.
I do think verbal debates are over hyped and in an ideal world they would write oppositional essays to each other, and the media would do honest fact checking to explain context on any misleading statements in the essays, and we could have actually trusted experts to summarize the most important take aways. But obviously even that is too boring for most voters.
At the very least it might be interesting if both candidates had to provide their sources to the opposition ahead of time like how lawyers have to tell each other which witnesses will be involved ahead of time. That way debunkings can be prepared for bogus sources.
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Relative to the general public, we probably do. I don't think it's circle-jerking to say this forum is, on average, more intelligent, more educated, and more political aware than the average American (or the average redditor or Twitter poster). That doesn't mean we're a bunch of geniuses or that people here don't fall into the same predictable mindkilling partisanship as everywhere else, but yeah, the entire point of this forum is to try to make discussions more than exchanging insults and memes. The majority of the flack we mods get is because someone just wants to shit on his opposition and then feels mistreated when told he can't.
To answer your real question:
Yes. The overrated "undecided" or "swing" voter. They exist. They may be less than 10% of the electorate (maybe 5% or 6%?) but they are the ones who decide the election in battleground states. You're right that most people in the general public, and also most people here, are very unlikely to change which way they're going to vote even if Biden shits his pants or Trump eats a puppy on live TV. But there are people who are still swayable, and they're the ones who matter, basically.
You may also underestimate the impact of actually getting the vote out. A lot of people may be unwilling to vote for the other candidate, but if they find themselves thoroughly disgusted and demoralized by their candidate, they can just choose not to vote. Speaking personally - I do not like Trump, and do not want him to win (although I have to admit that if he does, I will feel a tiny frisson of schadenfreude enjoying meltdowns in certain quarters), but I am so unimpressed and unenthused about Biden that I'm almost in the "fuck it" camp myself.
I don't deny the existence of about this level of self-reported undecided, but I'm starting to develop an alternative theory.
I believe it was NBC (could've been CNN) ... after the debate, they had an "instant reaction panel" populated by "double haters." These are people who say the don't like either Biden or Trump, but still, I guess, intend to make up their mind and vote for one or the other. My pre-existing suspicion here was, "what new information are you waiting to see from either candidate?" For a time, the strongest answer to that was waiting to see if Trump got convicted. He did and that is legitimate new information. For those who are still undecided, I am having trouble identifying what new information is even out there for discovery?
But I digress. What came across as incredibly obvious during that "insta-panel" was that 4 of the 5 people there were obviously not double haters and were going to vote for either Biden or Trump. It was plain to see by how they answered the open ended question of "What's your initial reaction to the debate."
And I think there's a sizable about of voters like this. They say they're undecided or a double haters for a variety of vapid, stupid reasons. It get's them attention (in that people will try to convince them one way or the other), they get to demonstrate how "above it all" they are, or how they have these amazing nuanced and complex views that don't fit neatly into blue vs red.
Except that it's all made up and they probably know exactly who they're voting for.
A televised panel is never going to be actually any good. There's way too much "look mom I'm on TV". A well put together focus group is superior, and these actually do tend to reflect actual campaign trends pretty well. Even survey takers are subject to "this is a survey" bias, but we've gotten better over the years at comparing these surveys to physical realities, namely the public vote counts broken down by polling precinct, that most of the time we can figure this out and make appropriate adjustments. And all of these methods have found that yes, swing voters do exist as a small group, and yes, things like enthusiasm do predict turnout.
I believe you are correct.
How many "double haters" would voluntarily show up for a no-cameras focus group? It certainly wouldn't be zero, but I think it would be drastically less than the "10% of likely voters" number I see thrown around all the time.
In my opinion, Presidential campaigns since about Bush-Gore in 2000 come down to 47%/47% Blue vs Red default vote. We know the two big structural variables are the economy and incumbency advantage. Sometimes war is also that, but generally only one the U.S. is fully and obviously involved in and that has some strong immediate emotional saliency (Vietnam in 1968, Iraq in 2004).
Beyond that, it's mostly about the candidates building competing narratives targeted at the most important voter demographics in swing states and a little "get out the vote" party machinery. Therefore, running an effective campaign in the sense of management and execution - almost at a corporate level - isn't the most important thing, it's the only thing. Substance, issues, vision kind of doesn't matter if you can't get it into voters heads, and you do that with a lot of activity that looks more like a corporate marketing campaign than you do with impassioned Patrick Henry level speeches.
The accurate knock against the 2016 Trump campaign was that it was poorly run. It absolutely was. But it was better run than the Hillary campaign that (a) Took off the month of September and (b) routinely dismissed highly reliable polls on the midwest and didn't focus her visits there when it mattered.
So when I look at Trump vs Biden in 2024, I'm looking at who's running a better campaign like an investor looks at the operations of a logistics company. Obviously, I can't get into the various war rooms on a day to day basis, so I have to use public appearances and general messaging as a proxy. The debate on Thursday showed me that with a full week of preparation and multiple months of "he's cognitively sharp!" messaging, the Biden campaign couldn't turn in the basics. This is like my analogous logistics company failing to print shipping labels. It's a failure at such a basic level.
Whatever the recovery plan might be - Biden stays in, but Harris becomes more visible, a ticket flip (Harris-Biden instead of Biden-Harris) - it doesn't matter. The ops are broken. The basics aren't in place. Certainly not at the level to achieve an insanely high risk stunt that they now have to do because of the Debate.
There is a reason why focus group participants are paid. How many double haters would explain just how much they hate both candidates in front of a sympathetic audience for $100? Quite a lot.
The point of a focus group isn't to get a large enough sample for statistically meaningful results - it is to listen to what people say. You only need 5-15 people to hear all the common opinions, so you can afford to pay them.
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I imagine there is more movement in who votes than in changing votes.
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The price of gas in late October, cynically. Optimistically there are always a few candidate specific issues we can learn more about as time goes on, although the biggest one in this race is probably 'how senile is Joe Biden, exactly?' and normies are taking last night as a definite answer.
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I think there are probably very few people who are genuinely so undecided that it's a coin flip which way they'll go. But I think there are a fair number of people who lean towards one or the other but might still be convinced (by a disastrous debate performance, by some new breaking scandal, by an emerging crisis) to go the other way.
That said, I agree that a lot of "undecideds" just like to pretend they're open to being persuaded so people will fawn over them.
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Pretending that canned practiced debate lines is meaningful is worse than insults and memes. It is actively refusing to understand. The guy making memes has a better worldview: he sees Biden looking old and lost, and he feels panic or glee. Only in this highly reified artificial fake turfwar debate do we say, "Aside from the stuttering, the mumbling, the bad faces, the halting voice, the aged walk, and the glazed eyes, how did he do?"
I appreciate that the Motte is smarter than average, which makes it even more frustrating to argue made-up intellectual exercises. The guy posting memes of Biden in a diaper has a better understanding of the debate. The guy saying he doesn't care because he hates Trump has a better understanding. The guy saying Biden looked horrible and needs to drop out has a better understanding. The guy saying that Biden did fine, because he did better than he expected, has no understanding. He has negative understanding. Normies are just seeing Biden's decline for the first time, but I'm smarter and world-weary and cynical and jaded and I can judge Biden's real performance. Using more intelligence asking the wrong questions means a worse answer. That's what we're doing.
Your whole premise is flawed. It might make sense if we had some rule that everyone has to watch the debate but we don't. Normies wouldn't be caught dead spending over an hour watching two old people spittle on each other. CNN seems to have claimed somewhere between 50 to 80 million people tuned in, many of which could be internationals. What does influence normies is what their politics brained friends and collogues tell them happened and that is downstream of the words and the performance.
I think normies tune in for the first thirty minutes or so.
A single poll before the debate very roughly broke it down into one third of US adults were very/extremely likely to watch live. Slightly more than that were going to watch clips or analysis after the fact. Due to splits in response, this was a bit over half overall of respondents who were very/extremely likely to get some form of debate content, and only a quarter who weren't going to tune in or look after at all.
Anecdotally, even some of the more politically-engaged people I know only tuned in for about 15-20 minutes, in most cases near the beginning, and in many cases a random stretch out of curiosity only. The actual viewership implies that the poll was either a significant over-estimate, or there were a lot of people why couldn't bring themselves to watch despite intending to. Probably the former, this kind of survey is not very accurate for this type of question, in part because the question reveals the simple fact that there is a debate happening! A fact most are only vaguely aware of, much less the exact day. Plus maybe some survey bias and personal overestimation of probability. I'm betting a massive chunk of the viewership were these already extremely-likely people.
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I'm not sure what this has to do with me. Normal people don't watch presidential debates (?), therefore... we should debate made-up talking points made up by the politicians?
Normal people don't watch debates, they get their info from people who do. People who watch debates can take all sorts of things from them some of which are the actual policies hit on. It's a very dynamic thing.
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I don't think your description of what the discussion here looks like is accurate. I mean, in the mainstream media, yes, there is a lot of cope and denial about Biden's mental acuity. Here, I don't see a lot of people denying that Biden is cognitively declining.
I think Biden did better than I expected (which was a very low bar). I don't know that I'd say he did "fine" - he certainly bombed with the audience. But it's not clear to me what you think the "correct" understanding of the debate would be that you think is being missed here. It seems like you want everyone to vigorously nod their heads at your own highly partisan take. Instead, we dissect what the candidate actually said, and we also evaluate to what degree Biden's faculties have declined, and also we evaluate how it's going over with the "normie" voter. Those all seems like fairly rational takes to me. No back-patting and circle-jerking required for us to be offering better discussions than people lobbing grenades at how much their guy sucks less than the other guy.
He has a better understanding of what plays well on social media, so I don't blame Trump partisans for posting memes of Biden in diapers. But this isn't that place.
I think the idea is this:
Imagine if Biden been a bit more together, and had successfully given a line about, say, "we spent 300 million more on Medicare". Realistically, that number would almost certainly have been Sir-Humphrey'd to death. 100 million of it would turn out to be money that they were already spending, classified in a way to allow it to be used for the factoid. Say, reclassifying 'elderly medical support' as 'medicare assist for the elderly'. Another 100 million would be money that hadn't actually been spent yet, but had been put aside on the budget and probably would be spent this year unless it got used for something else instead.
We, and the partisan media, would get to work on this. Some people will say that it's all bollocks and he hasn't done anything. Other people would say that no, the money is there and it's being spent. And in reality, very little new information would have got through. Biden is spending a bit more on Medicare, probably.
So I believe that @SlowBoy's argument is that paying attention to what is actually said in debates (or elections) is a fool's errand. Everyone knows that the promises will not be carried out, that the numbers will be carefully constructed houses of cards, etc. All the promises, the statistics, are intended to produce a vibe. The real message that Biden is trying to convey is "Biden cares about medicare. Biden strong."
According to this argument, people paying attention to what is said, rather than the vibes and the character that is revealed, are paying attention to the wrong thing. The debate is supposed to be a vibes-based slugfest.
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My takes are highly partisan, your takes are... neutral and objective?
I don't think you are understanding me Mayne you want to reflexively defend the Motte. I am not arguing that anyone here is coping over Biden's decline. I am arguing that there is a lot of discussion along the lines of...,: -- "Besides that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" "We discuss what the candidate actually said." Yes, that's the rat trap. We all know that the promises politicians make are not enforceable. They are riddled with lies. They were rehearsed in a backroom focus test to sound good. They were designed to manipulate us. So why are we discussing them seriously?
As the "highly partisan take"-maker, I have a coherent interpretation of the debate: Biden showed serious mental decline, and lost. The actual specific answers aren't really important. And I don't think anybody cares really what either guy said.
So let's come back to this:
If Biden is in serious decline, why would you "dissect what he actually said"? How is that not an act in rationalizing?
Ultimately that's what bugs me so much about the whole "Trump lies" schtick I hear from the media and the PMC.
It's tone deaf and insulting to the public, because the public knows very well what they have in front of them. They know politicians are salesmen, pitching a product. Usually, pitching that product will involve some sort of lie if we take that word in an narrow sense. The car salesman who tells you the deal he's offering you is the best in the industry, is that a lie? I mean, maybe technically, but only a very socially stunted person would get offended by it, stand up and point at the car salesman and yell "LIAR! THIS ISN'T THE BEST DEAL, AT HONDA THEY MADE ME A BETTER DEAL!" The dude's trying to sell a car, you know that coming into the dealership.
And Trump as a salesman is a lot like a car salesman, Obama is more like a startup founder pitching to angel investors. But both are selling something, trying to make their product look as good as they can, and yes, technically lying. Or omitting important truths. But the public already knows this, they've interacted with salesman, they know that not everything you hear from a salesman is to be taken at face value. But the media thinks that since Trump talks like a blue collar worker and Obama like a university professor they can make you "realize" that Trump is lying but since he uses big words maybe they can fool you into thinking Obama is not. Which is insulting because the public knows they're both just as much salesmen one as the other for a long time, it's all been priced in already.
I think this is an especially important understanding because to a large degree, the job of United States CEO is about being the face man, in effect the salesman selling the United States position to the rest of the world and his federal government policy to the rest of the country. Therefore, being an effective persuader, i.e. being an effective salesman, is actually a major qualification for the job being sought!
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And ultimately I'm in the camp that the debate is probably not going to move the needle much, unless it causes Biden to be replaced, because of the same reason. People know what they have in front of them. The only thing it will change is independents who already knew they would like to vote Trump but needed an excuse to voice it now have it.
I don't think anyone doubted since 2020 that Biden was not reaaaally going to be in charge. The guy was always entirely a vote in favor of letting the PMC/The Deep State/the Cathedral/the Swamp/The Adults In the Room/whatever you want to call it reassert control of the government, and they on-purpose pushed a candidate with little ability to assert himself to represent that choice. Biden's cognitive state never mattered, except that now they think they have an excuse to saddle him with the blame for all the failures of the last 4 years and replace him with someone who's going to come into this looking like a fresh start.
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I wasn't really talking about my takes here, though yes, I do think I am less partisan and more objective than you.
I don't reflexively defend the Motte - I have a lot of criticisms of the discourse here. I just don't think your criticism is accurate.
Well, the general consensus is that Biden did very, very badly but for all that Nate Silver seems to think Trump is virtually a shoo-in, people have been dramatically wrong about how an election will turn out before, so if you want everyone to just settle on the consensus agreement "Biden lost and the election is over," I am not surprised you aren't seeing that.
Because it matters how serious the decline is. If he is (as some people seem to think) virtually non-compos mentis and only able to handle public appearances with serious drugs, that's different than if he's still more or less got all his marbles and has just slowed down a lot. If he's still functional but declining, then what he believes (and would do) as President matters. If he's a zombie being puppeted by his handlers, then no, what he says probably doesn't matter.
You seem to have misunderstood my argument as something dumb like, "Joe Biden is senile and poops in his pants and Trump is awesome the motte suxxxx hahahahaha BTGO".
What I'm telling you is that your objectivity doesn't exist, and debates are fake and gay, and I want to see Trump and Biden gorilla smash funhouse wrestlemania. I want us to stop reading fact-check statslop fanfic and pick up some Byron or Keats. I want to watch Rocky and Drago slug it out until somebody dies. I want to see Trump yelling. I want to see Biden yelling. I don't care about whatever some focus-tested Dem-Rep slogan-pollster convinced Biden to say. I don't care about made-up technical details. It's beneath my dignity to be manipulated.
Thinking empty things isn't thinking.
Well said.
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I loathe fact checking. So many times the fact checkers are wrong, or take claims that obviously are claims of opinions as testable fact, or focus overly literally. It isn’t an honest enterprise.
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I don't think anyone is truly "objective", but not everyone wants the same thing. You want wrestlemania; fine. I care about facts, even if those aren't the things that win elections. The Motte leans more towards the latter, and "debates are fake and gay" I can get on Twitter.
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Motte being the upspring of rationalist culture does harbor people that care more about whether something is actually true. And this is generally very good metric for politicians. Because they will make important decisions and when they do it doesn't matter how flashy or rethorically potent they are. And it's historically been the case that competent technocratic leaders were better for their populace than loud demagogues.
Yes to your previous points, but:
That's sure one opinion. I'm not entirely sure you are even wrong, but "competent technocratic leaders" is so poisoned by the modern EU and American Democrats.
This is the Elizabeth Warren of political views.
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That's the problem! Nothing anyone says in a presidential debate is true. The highest apex virtue peak of substance-over-style is empty words. Biden says that a seven-point-four tax whatever is marginally more efficient at generating revenue for solar panels, and Trump counters with seven-point-three. When I'm elected, we'll make progress on making progress. We are beyond true and false. Politicians are constantly making promises they don't intend to keep, that nobody expects them to keep, that we have no means of making them keep. And we sit around debating whether those promises sound good!
No! Bring back the slaughter! Give me screaming and yells. I don't care if Biden's tax plan is technically more correct than Trump's. (How would you even know if it was? Who "decides"? Sixteen economists?) It doesn't mean anything. I want to know if Biden will shrink under pressure. I want to know if Trump has a vision. I want to know if the Vice President is a cringelord wineaunt Machiavellian doomerpilled femcel broke-a-loid edgy based-woke calmchad. Is God on his side? Does he have the mandate of Lady Heavenluck? Does he swing a big dick or is he going to get schlonged because he's a technocrat who can't lead smoke out of a fire?
Who cares about "the actual truth"? There isn't any! We all know that campaign promises are a lie. We all know what we already think about both candidates. We already know our hopes amd fears. Why do we put on this useless pretension of evaluating their technical words as though anybody cares? I also love highly ritualized choreographies of martial valor. This isn't a parade. This is war!
Personality is important. So is policy. For all that Trump is based and chad, his inability to grasp policy has prevented him from getting much done. And yeah, part of that is being able to use technical language. That doesn't mean that they need to be able to rattle off trivia like an Aaron Sorkin character, but it does mean they need to know the difference between Iraqi immigrants, Iranian insurgents, immunocompromised indigents, industrial incentives and indignant indigenes.
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