Tag: debate prep

Posted on

Joe Must Go. Politics Ain’t Beanbag.

Some of us remember Lyndon Johnson renouncing the presidency in 1968, one of his finest moments. Some of us remember Nixon being forced out under pressure. Now we hold our collective breaths to see what Joe Biden will do. If he doesn’t resign, there is no hope of beating Trump in the next election. The results of which we leave to your imagination.

In one sense his decision will rest in the hands of his family, his wife Jill and his longtime followers. The more senile Joe has become, the more they have protected him. He offers us few press conferences, infrequent unstaged interviews, clichéd speeches, and the same old downhome Scranton working class bullshit. Senile people forever keep on referencing the past.

As someone who has done debate prep, it appeared to me that he likely had no professional coaching and relied solely on his White House cronies (Ron Klain, Bob Bauer et al.). James Carville said it too: “He doesn’t have advisers. He has employees.” Odds are they stuffed him with the obvious issues and canned responses. No professional coach would have let him appear as he did. Pee in your pants, call in sick, for God’s sake.

Presidential debates generally are more style than substance, and they are a perfect vehicle for a convincing conman.  Trump rapidly floats his same (or worse) whoppers and gets away with it uncontested. He paralyzes our analytical powers and takes obvious joy in manipulating people. Many want to believe him because it’s their form of heroin. In the flood of this the truth cannot prevail; people like Truthful Joe cannot prevail.

Part of the problem is that Biden has usually wanted to avoid being in the public eye―and the public hasn’t been crazy about seeing him either. Lili Loofbourow in the WaPo nicely put it this way: “Biden’s unwillingness and inability to court attention has, for example, made it difficult for him to sell the public on his achievements.”

There have been many comments urging Biden to quit—and many urging the opposite. Among the best and most forthright of the former is Tom Friedman’s. He urges his friend Joe Biden to step aside.

I had been ready to give Biden the benefit of the doubt up to now, because during the times I engaged with him one on one, I found him up to the job. He clearly is not any longer. His family and his staff had to have known that. They have been holed up at Camp David preparing for this momentous debate for days now. If that is the best performance they could summon from him, he should preserve his dignity and leave the stage at the end of this term.

Finally, it’s not overly dramatic to say that the state of the nation is at stake and we face a  drastic challenge to democratic rule. Your decision, like it or not, is a political one―to win the election. You can discount everything else: the mess that will be wrought on the Democratic convention if Biden drops out, loyalty to the party and the president, the shortcomings of other challengers. Trump made it this way. He cannot survive.

Posted on

Debate Prep: A Remembrance

On Thursday evening comes CNN’s ballyhooed clown show with two unsympathetic candidates. Neither of them is very good at debating, and one has eschewed all preparation. Many will watch to see who stumbles the most, not who wins.

The attraction of a political debate is more than seeing who scores the most points. It’s to discover whom we finally can identify with. The Kennedy-Nixon televised debates in 1960 set the pattern: JFK was relaxed, prepared, and showed some style. Nixon’s presentation was cold-blooded and his tense body language gave him away. TV made all the difference, this for the first time. Though we know political media is very different now, the visual truth remains, despite AI.

When I was teaching presentation skills, I got a great mashup video cassette of those debates from a friend at American Express, where we were coaching some execs. I wish I still had it. Let’s hope that whoever is coaching Biden shows them that tape.

Biden is a hard man to identify with, while Trump is just a bomb-thrower. And debate prep is more than bringing your client up to speed on the issues and your opponent’s weaknesses. You must enable him to show his character, his realness, that he’s not just the guy you could have a beer with but someone you could warm to and respect. Reagan sets the example here.

I worked with two Rhode Island governors in the 1980s, Ed DiPrete, a Republican who later went to jail, and Bruce Sundlun, a Democrat. They battled each other several times for the governorship, and finally Bruce won in 1990 with a landslide 74% of the vote. I coached him in his presentations (speeches and press conferences, etc.) and prepared him for his first debate in 1986. He was not an easy person to work with.

Besides being irascible and unpredictable, Sundlun had had an incredible career as a WWII bomber pilot flying B-17s over Germany, getting shot down and surviving with the French Resistance, then postwar becoming a very successful businessman, which led him into a life of public service and, finally, politics.

I worked with him on the contentious issues, of course, but the main thrust was to get him to relax and open up about his present life―and his goal to make Rhode Island a destination for tourism and business. It was challenging to convince him to talk openly about himself without being pompous. “Captain Blowhard” the Providence Journal called him. Well, the man had a lot to be pompous about. His wife-to-be Susie was sometimes present in our sessions and she hassled him about that.

There are some techniques to get a client to open up and reveal who he really is. One is getting him to tell stories about growing up and remember being a kid again. Bruce finally got the message to humanize himself, I think, even though he lost that race to DiPrete.

Our sessions were also a real lesson to me about what moves people and how persuasion works on television. You’ll see once again on Thursday whether debate prep matters.

Posted on

Really, I Wouldn’t Have a Beer with Either of Them

Trump at the Debate Was Like America in 2020: Not Winning

 ‘The Debates, Like Everything Else in 2020, Were a Dumpster Fire’

 Malaika Jabali: ‘A frustrating debate that ignored big issues’

Trump would be insulting and contentious; Biden would bore you with policy and his accomplishments. That’s pretty much what they did last night at the last (thank God) presidential debate.

For many of us the race has become old and hackneyed, the participants frayed. I spent this morning looking for new insights on the internet and didn’t find many.

Of course I will vote for Biden, but that doesn’t mean he’s an appealing candidate. The man needs a shot of mezcal, not a beer. In the debate he was focused but often bland and wordy. He fumbled on answers regarding the 1994 crime bill and fracking. In his debate prep he could have done more work on sharp, memorable responses, though he did get off a few. Per Susan Glasser in The New Yorker:

“He’s a very confused guy,” Biden said of Trump when the President claimed, per usual, that Biden was some sort of radical socialist pawn. “He thinks he’s running against somebody else. He’s running against Joe Biden.”

Trump babbled incoherently about Hunter Biden’s emails, overriding the moderator, and frequently going off the deep end: “Who built the cages, Joe?” John Neffinger in Politico:

Having set the bar ridiculously low in his last few appearances, President Trump impressed just by not seeming out of control Thursday night. But if he was more conversational, it made it easier to hear him clearly when he declared himself the least racist person in the room, or criticized a public option, or talked about the great care the children he orphaned get, or made fun of Joe Biden talking to Americans about their own families, or declined to answer good questions from Kristen Welker about Covid or the Talk [that Black parents must have with their children about racism].

Malaika Jabali in The Guardian was angry about what she didn’t hear:

There was no discussion about potential domestic voter suppression, less than two weeks before the election. Nothing about far-right white supremacists, who pose the deadliest terror threat in the country. Nothing about policies to reduce racial disparities in unemployment, essential work, Covid-19 deaths and cases, or small business closures.

And not much about climate change except a lot of smoke. Anyhow, as to having a drink with either of these guys, Trump, who doesn’t drink, would be most likely to get in a bar fight and Joe would most likely put one to sleep. We all need better forms of entertainment, something like the new Borat movie which shows Rudy Giuliani in a delightfully compromising position. He too would be among the last guys to have a drink with.