The CNN Biden -Trump Debate And The Alarm Bells In Nigeria With Gerontocratic Candidates. Why There May Be No Debate In 2027
The Oasis Reporters
June 28, 2024
In Nigeria, political contestants with a thing or two to hide, fight shy of holding debates in public. Add to this, a country that also has an electoral umpire never known to be cited in Africa as a model of an impartial arbiter at election time, then understand how the pot boils.
Therefore if Joe Biden loses November’s election, apart from history that will record that it took just 10 minutes to destroy a presidency.
That is all that it will need to cook the plot against holding Presidential debates again in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous democracy that usually throws up presidential candidates in their seventies and eighties. It doesn’t matter that the presidential seat is seen with very dreamy eyes of retirement for the rich and the elderly.
The kind of candidates who want the kind of continuity that they are familiar with since birth. As there would be no initiative and no imagination, the nation remains in the motion of stagnation as the young men and women flee into economic migration abroad.
Meanwhile in America, the news anchor, CNN says
“It was clear a political disaster was about to unfold as soon as the 81-year-old commander in chief stiffly shuffled on stage in Atlanta to stand eight feet from ex-President Donald Trump at what may turn into the most fateful presidential debate in history.
Objectively, Biden produced the weakest performance since John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon started the tradition of televised debates in 1960 — then, as on Thursday, in a television studio with no audience.
Minutes into the showdown, hosted by CNN, a full-blown Democratic panic was underway at the idea of heading into the election with such a diminished figure at the top of the ticket.
Biden’s chief debate coach, Ron Klain, famously argues that “while you can lose a debate at any time, you can only win it in the first 30 minutes.” By that standard, the president’s showing was
devastating. The tone of the evening was set well before the half hour.
It is too early to say how voters will respond and whether the president can rescue himself. But Biden barely beat Trump in key battleground states in the middle of a pandemic in 2020. His approval rating was below 40% before the debate, when he was at best neck-and-neck with his rival in the polls. It would only take a few thousand voters to desert him to put Trump back in the White House.
There has been no public sign that Biden is unable to currently fulfill the duties of the presidency, which include tough decisions on national security.
He has just returned from two grueling foreign trips, for instance. But on Thursday’s evidence, his ability to communicate with the country — and even to sell his own vision for a second term — is severely compromised.
If Thursday’s debate was the president’s best chance to turn around a tight race with Trump, which has him in deep peril of losing reelection, it was a failure.
Biden ended the night with the Democratic Party in crisis with serious conversations taking place behind the scenes among senior figures over whether his candidacy is now sustainable, two months before the Democratic National Convention.
The ex-president didn’t avoid his own disqualifying issues. He was uncouth and divisive. He spouted outrageous falsehoods about his own presidency, his attempt to steal the last election, and sometimes lapsed into gibberish himself, especially when asked about climate change. He blatantly lied about his role in the mob attack by his supporters on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The twice-impeached convicted felon repeatedly declined to say that he would accept the result of the 2024 election if he lost and made sweeping, vague and often illogical claims that US enemies overseas would bend to his will just because of his personality. The former president also struggled to parry Biden’s arguments that he’d slash taxes for rich Americans and leave workers struggling and he was wobbly on policy, just as he was in the White House.
By the time the aged rivals slipped into a bitter debate about who was the best golfer, it was not hard to understand why voters have long told pollsters that they want no part of the choice they have been offered this year”.
Well, the debate was watched in Nigeria on television. Those that may file up to jaw jaw would include personalities like the sitting president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar and Rabiu Kwankwaso. These are gentlemen with deep pockets.
A younger Peter Obi would also be there unless there are factors that stop him which seem unlikely.
Who would call for a debate?
Chances that it would be parried are stark. Biden’s experience would be ringing an alarm bell from now, and excuses would begin to be manufactured by aides, from now till 2027.
Greg Abolo, with additional reporting from CNN’s Meanwhile In America.
