Debate questions they’ll never ask Biden, Trump | Will Bunch Newsletter

The dog days of summer are here — and we’re only five days past the summer solstice! I have questions. Like, if it’s already this hot now, how will we ever survive July and August? Also, why do they call it “the dog days” when my local dog park is utterly deserted, except for me and Daisy finding the shadiest spot, sharing a large bottle of water, and not moving. Only 69 more days until Labor Day!

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I don’t know if you’ve heard anything about it, but there’s this debate scheduled for Thursday night in Atlanta between Donald Trump and President Joe Biden. LOL, just kidding — this is pretty much all people have talked about on TV for the last two weeks, especially on CNN, which is hosting the first summertime presidential debate in American history. Heck, if Jesus Christ returned to Earth this afternoon, CNN would cover it 40 minutes into the hour, and only after a lengthy political panel with a Democratic and Republican political consultant, a body-language expert, and a high school debate coach.

Everyone and their cousin has advice for the former and current president, almost all of it terrible. The worst piece — actually maybe the worst op-ed I’ve ever read, of any kind — was published Monday in the Washington Post by Francis S. Barry, a speechwriter for the wildly successful (#sarcasm) 2020 Michael Bloomberg presidential campaign. Barry, an Abraham Lincoln fanatic, advised Biden to be like Honest Abe — not the guy who ended slavery, held the nation together, and won the Civil War, but an 1858 “hippie punching” version who proved in a debate he was no radical by “assuring his audience that he was neither an abolitionist nor a believer in Black equality, and reaffirming his support for the right of enslavers to reclaim their ‘fugitives.’”

Excuse me? Aside from the racial insensitivity here, doesn’t Trump have the Fugitive Slave Act vote locked up at this point?

But here’s what bothers me almost as much. About 99% of the bottomless shrimp of TV coverage ahead of Thursday’s debate has focused not on substance, but on style — especially whether the two oldest men ever to run for president are up to the 90-minute task, given Trump’s increasingly bizarre verbal digressions and Biden’s tendency to stumble verbally. This is unfortunate.

The reason that millions of voters, and especially young people, are so down on the 2024 race is that no one is talking about the issues that matter to them. Here’s an hour-and-a-half chance to get it right.

CNN’s resident Philly sports fanatic Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are solid choices to moderate, and they will surely ask about inflation, the Middle East, and, in an endless streak of 90-degree-plus days in Atlanta, climate change. But I imagine a few gotcha questions and personalized jabs — like, “Which one of you is a convicted felon?” — are in the mix.

But what would a debate for normal folks look like? Here are some of the questions I’d love to see.

1. Housing Millions of young Americans agree on one thing: The rent is too damn high. Since 1985, rents have risen 40% faster than the rate of inflation, pricing many younger big-city workers out of the market. There are too few apartments and too few starter homes for those who can afford rising interest rates. What do you promise to do about it as president?

Backstory: A recent poll found a whopping 91% of Gen Z voters (aged 18-27) say that housing affordability is very or somewhat important to them — more than any other issue. And why wouldn’t it be, given the millions who turn down big-city job offers, postpone marriage, or live with their parents because they can’t afford the rent or even think about owning a home? This seems tough for Biden since rents have soared on his watch, but he did highlight the issue in his last State of the Union Address with a proposal now gridlocked on Capitol Hill. We’re still waiting to hear if Trump has a plan.

2. Policing. Last month marked the fourth anniversary of the police murder of George Floyd, which caused at least 17 million Americans to march for racial justice. Yet few police reforms have been enacted, and law-enforcement officers are killing civilians at record rates. What will you do as president to make cops more accountable to the public? If the George Floyd Justice in Policing Bill reaches your desk, would you sign it?

Backstory: There’s no better place to ask this than Atlanta, bitterly divided over the police training center known as “Cop City“ and still largely in the midst of some civic soul-searching after the 2020 police killing of Rayshard Brooks. The failure of elected officials in both parties to respond to the public outcry over Floyd’s death and broader police brutality has revealed a broken political system. The 2021 bill named for Floyd, which limited qualified immunity for officers among its many provisions, was co-sponsored by a key Trump ally, Sen. Tim Scott, so it would be interesting to ask Trump if he supports it.

3. Health care. No other developed nation in the world has medical debt and medical bankruptcies as we do here in the United States. Health-related issues cause an estimated 530,000 Americans to file for bankruptcy every year. What is your plan for ending this crisis, reducing the rising out-of-pocket costs for American consumers, and bringing the United States into the 21st century on health-care affordability?

Backstory: Few American households don’t have a horror story about the high cost of privatized health care in this country, whether it’s rising deductibles or expensive copays for necessary medicines, or insurance companies denying a procedure under “prior authorization,” or add-on payments like a hospital facility fee. And yet these problems are rarely discussed on the campaign trail, beyond Trump’s eight-years-and-running pledge to replace Obamacare with something “terrific.”

4. Higher education. More and more young people are giving up on the American Dream of college because they can no longer afford it and don’t want to join the $1.73 trillion mountain of student debt. Lower college enrollment robs America of economic growth potential and a chance to help educated critical thinkers become better citizens. What can the federal government do to make public universities affordable, as they once were?

Backstory: The exorbitant cost of college and the fear of entering the job market without a diploma hangs over American families like the sword of Damocles, even as public trust in our universities has plunged to an all-time low of 36%. Biden has focused on reducing existing student debt and has some wins to his credit, but there’s been too little focus on curbing costs for the next generation. Trump has said little about college beyond wanting to deport protesters.

5. Climate. Millions of Americans are suffering this summer under extreme heat warnings, drought, wildfires, epic flooding, and a major hurricane threat. Many families can’t afford or even get home insurance because of climate change. And yet the United States set an all-time record for fossil-fuel production in 2023. Scientists say that it’s urgent that we hit a 50% reduction in greenhouse-gas pollution over the next six years. How will you get us there?

Backstory: The looming long hot summer of climate-driven disasters screams for more aggressive action. Biden won $270 billion for climate action in areas like green energy and electric vehicles in 2022′s Inflation Reduction Act, which makes him the most successful POTUS ever in fighting global warming — but the spike in oil-and-gas production shows our lingering dependence on fossil fuels. Trump, meanwhile, needs to explain his recent dialing for dollars with Big Oil CEOs.

I’ve been watching presidential debates since Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter came to Philadelphia in 1976, and I’ve seen them become vehicles for clever soundbites and little substance. Ironically, the best questions have been the few times when they let regular Americans ― and not journalists — do the asking. Real talk about how to pay the rent or college tuition might actually get folks interested in November. Because if we screw this one up, come 2028, I’m not worried there won’t be a debate. I’m worried there won’t be an election.

Question: Polls have been all over the map. Are there any other ways to predict winner (economy, inflation, wages, unemployment, war, etc.) — Via DrewB123 (@drewinphilly) on Twitter/X

Answer: Drew, that’s a great question. It used to be the case, in my younger days as a campaign reporter, that political scientists insisted the health of the economy was a better predictor of presidential election outcomes than anything else, including polls. For example, Iowa political scientist Michael Lewis-Beck correctly predicted 15 of 18 presidential elections with a forecasting model that included economic growth. But he and other political scientists now agree that extreme polarization has broken the models. Today, voters’ view of the economy depends on which political party they root for, or against. Neither polls nor the unemployment rate can predict what will happen on Nov. 5. Both sides simply need to find every one of their voters and get them to the polls.

I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that fans of The Will Bunch Newsletter are NOT fans of school vouchers — the use of taxpayer dollars to allow some kids to underwrite the cost of private school. Judy Voois summed up the prevailing sentiment when she gave the idea a resounding “NO!,” adding: “What ALL students deserve is to attend high-quality public schools in their own neighborhoods — schools that have sufficient well-paid faculty, support staff and administrators in clean, comfortable and well-maintained buildings.” Self-described “old lady” Anne Brennan told me about attending Catholic school as a youth — a choice she believes families should pay for. “I do believe that PA has not funded all PA schools equally,” she added. “I find this inexcusable.” So do I.

📮This week’s question: I’m going to try an experiment here and ask you to hold your responses until after Thursday night, and then tell me who won the big presidential debate, and why. For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Debate Winner” in the subject line.

They are not yet done counting the dead in Ruidoso, New Mexico — site of America’s newest climate-related disaster. The two wildfires that raced across the dry, unseasonably hot forests of the American Southwest merged last week in Ruidoso and destroyed some 500 homes in the small town, leaving two people confirmed dead. But officials fear there are more fatalities and have teams of dogs helping them in a door-to-door search of charred ruins. Those who fled were allowed back into town on Monday but are terrified of what they might find. “I’m kind of scared to go back and just wondering what [it’s] gonna look like,” David Solas told a local TV station.

Meanwhile, life in much of the rest of the nation slowed to a crawl as the massive heat dome caused daily temperature records to fall across the Midwest and the Northeast, including 98 degrees here in Philadelphia on Sunday. Experts are already wondering if 2024 will pass last year’s total of heat waves that was the most since 1936 and claimed 2,300 lives, an all-time record. Intense rains that followed the heat wave have huge swaths of Iowa and South Dakota under water. In Florida, where greater Miami was swamped by yet another once-in-200-years flood recently, insurance companies continue to leave the state as homeowners simmer over massive bills or sudden cancellations.

Summer is only five days old, and forecasters are predicting that July — traditionally the warmest month — will be unseasonably hot as well. It seems reasonable to ask if there’s a point in 2024 in which the climate crisis boils over into the presidential race. Defying all reason, it hasn’t yet. Donald Trump, who once said “I don’t think science knows” if climate change is real, (spoiler alert: Science knows!) remains in denial. But for Trump, ignorance of climate science is the bliss that allows him to ask Big Oil CEOs for $1 billion in campaign contributions, in conjunction with a massive rollback of environmental regulations. President Joe Biden has a good record on fighting global warming, but right now he’d rather voters know about what he did to make it easier for them to buy gasoline. Is there some number of heat deaths, or some insurance crisis, that will change the status quo? In the long hot summer of 2024, we might, unfortunately, find out.

Speaking of fossil fuels, last week marked the fifth anniversary of a turning point for Philadelphia — the massive explosion and fire at the ancient South Philadelphia oil refinery that marked the beginning of the end for a city landmark that dated back to the Ulysses S. Grant administration. On this date in 2019, I cited the refinery blast, record-setting floods in South Jersey, and new evidence of childhood cancer from fracking in a plea for Pennsylvania to ditch its oil-and-gas economy. I wrote: “Let’s close the loop that started in 1859, and we’ll look back on June 21, 2019, not as a catastrophe but as the first day of Pennsylvania’s green and glorious new era.” Today, the refinery is gone, but fracking for natural gas is as big as ever. Read the rest: “Explosions! Floods! Cancer! What more will it take for Pa. to ditch fossil fuels?”

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