The presidential debate that wasn’t: Impressions from (parts of) dueling town halls

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Oct. 17, 2020

When competing town halls featuring each of the major-party presidential candidates were staged on Thursday evening, I opted to watch neither. However, I later decided to sample the first 25 minutes or so of the two events.

A few things stuck out right away. First, Savannah Guthrie, the NBC news anchor who hosted the town hall with President Donald Trump, opened her hour-long program with some pointed questions for the commander in chief. Guthrie asked why he had declined to condemn white supremacy (he said he had; she said that he hadn’t done so when Chris Wallace invited him to make a declaration during the first presidential debate). Guthrie also asked the president why he had retweeted a baseless conspiracy theory involving Seal Team 6. The president’s attitude quickly turned scrappy.

Former Vice President Joe Biden got no such grilling from George Stephanopoulos, the ABC news anchor who hosted the other town hall. (The event starts an hour into this video.) Instead, audience members began asking the Democrat questions almost immediately, although Stephanopoulos did pose a few follow-up queries as the event wore on.

Biden’s town hall lasted 90 minutes, although, like Trump’s, that included a few commercial breaks. Afterward, the Democratic nominee spent at least half an hour speaking with audience members. By contrast, the Republican incumbent left his venue shortly after the town hall concluded, pausing mainly to take pictures with attendees.

Beyond that, however, there were two major differences in the portions that I watched. These are men of very different styles, and it showed on Thursday. Trump loves boasting and uttering verbal jabs, and he did both during his event. He’s also prone to rambling and evading questions, tendencies that were on display as well.

I was struck by the first questioner, who asked Trump why his major response to the Covid-19 pandemic consisted of enacting a travel ban but didn’t include other steps that could have saved tens of thousands of lives. Trump’s answer consisted entirely of boasting about his travel bans on China and Europe, effectively ignoring the question. There was no indication that the president had given much thought to why America has one of the highest Covid-19 per-capita death rates in the world — a fact he had seemed intent on dismissing when Guthrie had raised it a few minutes earlier.

Like the president, Biden attacked his opponent, but he did so more genially. The longtime U.S. senator from Delaware seemed to engage far more deeply with the voters at the town hall than Trump; twice, Biden told attendees that he hoped he’d answered their questions. Like his foe, the Democratic nominee has been known to ramble, but he seemed focused on Thursday. Moreover, Biden discussed policy issues in far more granular detail than I can ever remember the current president doing in any kind of interview.

The Biden who showed up Thursday was both self-aware and empathetic, much like the man who delivered the acceptance speech in August at the Democratic national convention. On the whole, it was a more appealing version than the somewhat taciturn, tired-seeming Biden who debated Trump at the end of September.

But I don’t know how things will play out with the undecideds in Peoria. In my limited viewing, Trump didn’t get quite as obnoxious as he was at the candidates’ Sept. 29 meeting; maybe there were some folks watching this week who found him charming, or at least commanding. We’ll find out on or (hopefully not too long) after Nov. 3, I guess.