This Just In – America got its first deep breath in a long, long time on Tuesday night. After the presidential debate, I remembered that line from special reports on TV a long time ago. “We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.”
In a debate performance that can only be described as objectively masterful, we finally saw what we’ve been looking for all these years – a calm, professional leader taking apart the ridiculous, baseless fear-mongering from a dangerous demagogue. Seeing the 45th president bluster on during rallies about various fictional “threats” has been unnerving for many of us. Why does this guy still draw crowds of any size?
The more important question in national (and local) politics now is to review how in creation it came to pass that the Republican party rolled over and nominated him. It is a catastrophic failure of the political process that needs immediate attention.
When Dick and Liz Cheney are endorsing the Democratic party’s nominee and Liz Cheney is offering to campaign for her, it’s abundantly clear … the party is completely broken.
Harris has managed to accomplish an extraordinary feat. She’s an incumbent Vice-President, running a change election while proudly defending her record with the sitting President. The change she’s advocating isn’t policy change (not in the big picture of policy).
The change she’s offering is a return to our regularly scheduled programming. It’s politics, not the circus. It’s the business of working with the opposition party to arrive at compromise. It’s making progress and working continuously toward a more perfect union. It’s straight talk, not manipulation.
Timed exactly for maximum impact is the self-policing of the news media. There have been multiple stories in the last week berating the national press for doing a thing that now has a name: “sane-washing” Donald Trump.
People watch the presidential debate between Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, at the Gipsy Las Vegas in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)
This newly named practice (stand by, Merriam Webster) is what you call it when Trump says something completely unhinged, untrue and perhaps dangerous and the news coverage describes it in a manner that “cleans up” the language and smooths out the rough edges, as it were. This is lop-sided favoritism that Harris would never enjoy and the press and headline writers have finally been shaken awake about it.
Trump’s offensive assertions for the last couple of years that Democrats advocate for abortion on demand up to the full term of a pregnancy has always been a lie but now Trump insists that this extreme (and fictional) position now includes infanticide.
Finally, this was called out for the nonsense it is last night. The lying went on all night, but fortunately, the most offensive stuff about abortion and the craziest stuff about immigrants in Ohio abducting and eating pets happened in the first half-hour of the debate, when the audience was the largest.
Trump was routinely fact-checked by ABC News moderators and the very thing that has eluded politicians and reporters for the last nine years, seemed almost effortless and ordinary.
‘Ok, that’s not true – we checked and there are no reports of that.”
“There is no state in the country where infanticide is legal.”
Simple.
Fox News commentators said after the debate “This was a bad night for the President.”
Trump went to talk to reporters after the debate in the “spin room” and declared this was his “best debate ever.” Candidates don’t usually go to the spin room. They have their campaign surrogates do the talking for them. When you’re a paranoid narcissist, that just won’t do.
Miracles have happened this week. I got my driver’s license renewed in a reasonable time (thank you, Carrboro DMV) and my lungs got a fresh blast of clean air … from our cooling weather pattern, from journalists who are standing up to a lunatic and from seeing a highly competent woman displaying the skills and temperament of an adult in offering herself to serve this country.
We’re going to be okay.
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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