LOSE THE CROWDS

The influence of political candidate debates on election outcomes is hard to gauge: while millions of Americans often watch them, whether or not they actually change the opinions of those voters isn't always clear.  Remember that Presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama both had poor showings in their first reecletion debates, but they both still went on to win.  And the rise of televised debates have lead to a certain shallowness in their effect; the first televised presidential debate was in 1960.  Famously, people who just heard the debate thought that the Republican Richard Nixon defeated the Democrat John Kennedy.  But people who watched it thought that Kennedy won, partly because Nixon appeared to have a line of sweat under his upper lip!

And there are too many debates, in my opinion, especially when it comes to the presidential primaries, because then you have candidates who agree on 90% of the issues trying again and again to stand out from the others.  And when there are a high number of candidates, like the 17 that ran for the Republican nomination back in 2015, it becomes hard to tell most of them apart.

All that said, debates are still a good thing for the country, they can effectively sell a new candidate to the public (the debates in 2008 helped turn Barack Obama from upstart to contender), and  issues and differences can be discussed in a more honest format than those annoying political ads.  But there's still a change that I think needs to be made: stop holding the debates in front of live audiences.

 The first Republican primary presidential debate happened two days ago, and it provided a good example of what I'm talking about: at one point, Chris Christie started to criticize Donald Trump, and the chorus of boos that resulted saw him retreat from the subject.  Other moments brought more raucous reactions from the crowd, which got so unruly that the moderators had to tell them to quiet down more than once.  While disruptive crowd responses are nothing new in debates, like everything in politics, things have gotten worse since Trump arrived in 2015.  Since then, braying, booing crowds egging on Trump's worst statements have become the norm, trickling down into a debate that he wasn't even part of.

Personally, I think the best debate I've ever seen was the one between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in 2012 in which the two candidates were seated on chairs next to a table the whole time, with a moderator sitting in between them.  There was no crowd, so there was no playing to them, no attempt to come up with the best zinger or put down, there was just a frank discussion of the issues.  Now part of this is because Obama and Romney are both decent men who understood the concept of taking turns, and I'm not foolish enough to think that Trump wouldn't say anything horrible without a audience, but I still think it would tone down the chaos he brings to everything if there wasn't a crowd there goading him on.

Sadly, I can't imagine that the kind of more serious debate that I'm hoping for will ever become a reality in this country.  The sad fact of the matter is that candidates insulting each other while a crowd cheers is more exciting TV than a more restrained atmosphere.  So for ratings sake. we have to get used to more craziness and less seriousness in our debates pretty much forever.  But I do wish we could lose the crowds.

DONALD TRUMP UNFILTERED

 While I think that former President Donald Trump is a fool, there is one thing that he does that's smart: he never communicates with his political or business associates by email or text.  Like the mob bosses he is so often compared to, Trump realizes that having a trail of his communications with others could lead to revealing possible criminal behavior.  So when former Trump aides and associates repeat things that he may have said that are crazy (like say, using nuclear weapons to stop a tornado) or possibly criminal (suggesting that border patrols shoot  at undocumented immigrants coming over the border), we just have to take their word for it.

There is, however one way  that have heard  Trump's unvarnished opinions in the past few years: secret audio recordings.  Now saying something unwise when you don't know that you're being recorded is not a new problem for politicians: back in 2008 Barack Obama made an offhand comment when he didn't know he was being recorded about midwest voters  holding onto "guns or religion", that may have hurt him politically.  Also, Mitt Romney in 2012 disparaged people in America who pay no income tax at a fund raiser when he didn't know that he was being recorded, which made him look even more out of touch with the average American than he already was.

But it's Trump's secret recordings that really show what kind of man that he is: the first was, of course, the Access Hollywood tape back in 2016 in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women and getting away with it. Somehow he overcame the fallout from that recording to win the presidency, but other recordings may still lead to his downfall.   The second important secret recording of Trump came shortly after the 2020 election when Brad Raffensperger, the former Secretary of State in Georgia, recorded a phone call with Trump in which the then president pushed Raffensperger to "find" him votes.  Trump even implied that  Raffensperger himself could face some kind of legal problem for not finding those votes. (The tone of the call is interesting in that Trump's manner is mostly jovial, but his threatening stance still shines through.)  It should be no surprise that this recording is a part of the criminal charges recently brought against Trump by special council Jack Smith.  The last important Trump recording is about his holding of unclassified documents in his Mar O Lago home in Florida after his presidency.   Here, he clearly states that he is showing someone without security clearance classified documents, even remarking that he could have declassified them as president but didn't.  (Again, the tone is interesting in that he seems to want to impress the young woman that he's talking to in the recording, and they even joke about how Hillary Clinton got in trouble for much the same thing!).  And, as with the call to Raffensperger, this recording has become the basis for criminal charges made against Trump regarding his holding on to those secret documents.  So, putting it bluntly, there are 3 secret recordings of Trump that we have heard, the first of which has him bragging about committing a crime and getting away with, and the other two record the actual moment in which he commits a crime!   It's important to note that Trump is using a freedom of speech defense when it comes to his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.  But, as Smith's summary of charges points out, it was perfectly legal for Trump to lie about the election result and challenge it in court.  The crimes comes when he went beyond that by doing things like pressing Raffensperger to find him votes, or setting up an "alternate" set of electors, or trying to persuade then Vice President Mike Pence to reject the electoral vote count in the Senate, all of which would have illegally disenfranchised the  votes of the over 80 million Americans who went for Joe Biden.

The interesting thing to consider is that, if we have now heard Trump commit crimes on tape, how many other illegal things has he done in his life that we don't know about?  The mind boggles.  And given the fact that 26 different women have accused him of sexual assault or rape, it certainly likely that he has broken laws in the past.  Hopefully, now, for the first time in his life, he may actually be held accountable for his crimes.  We'll see.