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By Steve Wishnia

Working people’s issues barely got mentioned in the presidential debate June 27.

Well, in the first minute, President Joe Biden declared “working-class people are still in trouble,” when asked a question about the economy, and blamed inflation on “corporate greed” and the “chaos” he inherited from Donald Trump after COVID.

Trump claimed he’d created “the greatest economy of the history of our country” and that “the only jobs [Biden] created are for illegal immigrants and bounce-back jobs.”

That pretty much set the tone for the night. I lost count of the number of lies Trump told within 20 minutes. Among his bigger whoppers were that Biden let in more than “18 million to 19 million” illegal immigrants, who have killed “hundreds of thousands” of Americans; that Virginia and other “Democrat-run states allow abortion after birth”; and that during the “peaceful” invasion of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, he had offered then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “10,000 troops” and she had turned him down.

Also, that in the 2020 election, “the fraud was ridiculous”; that despite his criminal convictions and civil adjudications of fraud and sexual assault, “I did nothing wrong”; and “I never had sex with a porn star.” (Although she went into fairly lurid detail about his rude and unsatisfying performance.)

But in the bad theater criticism that dominates reaction to presidential debates, this likely worked in Trump’s favor. Biden often seemed to be fumbling for facts and phrases, probably because of age and/or having a cold, and partly because he was actually thinking about how to answer the question. Trump spewed a barrage of repeated lies and pet phrases like a white-nationalist Chatty Cathy doll, but he spewed them forcefully.

Trump didn’t just duck questions on the cost of child care, climate change, and whether there should be a Palestinian state. He completely ignored them. He responded to a question about what he would do to help parents afford child care by repeating his trademark rants about the illegal immigrants overrunning the border and Biden being the “worst President ever.” On opioid overdoses, he called Biden a “Manchurian candidate… “paid by China” and said “we were doing very well at addiction until COVID came along.” (According to federal Centers for Disease Control figures, deaths from opioid overdoses reached record highs of 47,600 in 2017, 49,860 in 2019, and more than 70,000 in 2020.)

The child-care question was about the only time the moderators touched directly on working-class issues.

Biden got in a few good one-liners—after Trump evaded saying he’d accept the results of the election, Biden said, “I doubt you’ll accept it because you’re such a whiner.” But overall, he missed several chances to articulate a clear theme and vision on issues. Asked about late-term abortions, he failed to say that virtually all women who have abortions in the last three months of pregnancy really want to have babies, but their lives are in danger, often because their babies have horrible and lethal birth defects.

When Trump responded to the child-care question with his rant, Biden answered by replying to Trump’s personal attacks instead of saying something like, “he just showed you he doesn’t care about American parents who need child care so they can work.” He gave one line about wanting to increase the tax credit for child-care expenses.

This is a common problem for centrist Democrats. Hillary Clinton, for example, never developed one for her campaign in 2016. When asked about climate change, Biden could have spoken about the life-threatening emergency of global warming and the need to ensure that the transition to sustainable energy creates good jobs. In other words, the Green New Deal, but that’s often denounced as a fringe-leftist idea.

The lack of attention to working-class issues is a loss for Biden, who has a decent record on labor (with the main exception the 2022 freight-rail contract). He couldn’t get the Protecting the Right to Organize Act through the Senate because of a Republican filibuster, but he got some green jobs into the Inflation Reduction Act, and has appointed people committed to expanding workers’ rights to the National Labor Relations Board. Trump’s record was abysmal: He named lawyers from union-busting firms to the NLRB, and appointed Supreme Court justices who repeatedly reversed precedents protecting workers’ rights.

If Biden could articulate a vision and program to improve working people’s lives, he’d have a much better chance of being re-elected. He didn’t get the chance to do that.

This was not a policy debate, and the lack of substance was bad for democracy. A well-informed public is absolutely essential for a functioning democracy. People need to be a little nerdy, to pay attention to the complexities of issues. It’s bad enough that presidential debates, which are supposed to be a time when the nation gets to hear the candidates, have long become contests about who had the most memorable one-liner or who made the worst “gaffe.” This one was a depressing alloy of tragedy and farce.

Good journalism is also essential for producing that well-informed public, and the decimation of journalism, particularly local and state-level reporting, has created a nation where many people are so ill-informed that they believe a fraud like Trump. I doubt many people are going to wade through the fact-checking.

And as a longtime New Yorker, one thing perplexes me. Why do so many people worship our erstwhile village idiot with cult-like adoration? He made former President George W. Bush, much derided for turning phrases like “Is our children learning?,” look like a policy wonk. Bush at least could speak in some detail about vehicle-emissions standards.