Top Democrats, including the former press secretary for Bill Clinton, are urging Joe Biden to simply skip the debates against Trump.
Joe Lockhart, former Clinton press secretary, wrote an op-ed piece for CNN. where he urged Joe Biden to ignore the three presidential debates.
According to The Daily Wire:
“Whatever you do, don’t debate Trump,” Lockhart wrote last week. “Trump has made more than 20,000 misleading or false statements according to the Washington Post. It’s a fool’s errand to enter the ring with someone who can’t follow the rules or the truth. Biden will undoubtedly take heat from Republicans and the media for skipping the debates. But it’s worth the risk as trying to debate someone incapable of telling the truth is an impossible contest to win.”
And Lockhart on Sunday wrote on Twitter: “Debating @realDonaldTrump is like debating the last drunk in a bar at closing time. Anybody ever win one of those debates. We built a wall and Mexico paid for it. We’ve beaten the invisible enemy. Nobody’s been tougher on Russia. Get me one more drink bartender.”
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Zac Petkanas, a former Hillary Clinton senior adviser, wrote on Twitter last week that Biden can skip the debates because Trump is not a “legitimate candidate,” and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said last month that Biden should debate Trump only if the president releases his tax returns and agrees to a real-time fact-check by an independent group during the debates.
Mike Huckabee responded to the calls as The Washington Times reported:
“Joe’s got to show up,” Huckabee said Sunday on Fox News, but he added that he understood Democrat’s desire to keep Biden off the stage. “If I were Joe Biden, I’d want to stay off the stage. There’s no way he can stand on the stage with President Trump and survive,” Huckabee said, according to The Washington Times.
Liberal journalist Elizabeth Drew recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times urging the same behavior from Biden.
It seems as this is becoming the new gameplan of the left.
According to The New York Times:
Nervous managers of the scheduled 2020 presidential debates are shuffling the logistics and locations to deal with the threat of the coronavirus. But here’s a better idea: Scrap them altogether. And not for health reasons.
The debates have never made sense as a test for presidential leadership. In fact, one could argue that they reward precisely the opposite of what we want in a president. When we were serious about the presidency, we wanted intelligence, thoughtfulness, knowledge, empathy and, to be sure, likability. It should also go without saying, dignity.
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But what is the point or relevance of the carefully prepared one-liner? It’s as spontaneous as a can of sardines. It’s usually delivered from a memory chip in the mind, having been fashioned and rehearsed with aides. When is a president called upon to put down an interlocutor, be it a member of Congress or a foreign leader?
This, by the way, isn’t written out of any concern that Donald Trump will prevail over Joe Biden in the debates; Mr. Biden has done just fine in a long string of such contests. The point is that “winning” a debate, however assessed, should be irrelevant, as are the debates themselves.
It isn’t written out of “concern that Donald Trump will prevail over Joe Biden” is a powerful qualifier sentence.
