Prominent Democrats (or, possibly, former Democrats) Mark Penn and Andrew Stein make some observations worth considering in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

Think back to the Trump-Biden debate in June, in which the CNN moderators exemplified fairness. Had they had spent time correcting Mr. Trump while letting his opponent off the hook, as ABC did, the result might not have been as lopsided, and Joe Biden might still be the nominee. But CNN did its job fairly, and the public got a meaningful read on the two candidates.

When referees put their thumbs on the scale, the game changes. The results have to be thrown out, we are robbed of our time, and democracy is drained of its meaning. A presidential debate shouldn’t be a staged wrestling match. It should feature two candidates on a level playing field so voters can make up their minds free of interference. Anything less makes a mockery of our institutions. ABC should have fact-checked both candidates or neither. Fact-checking only one was the worst possible decision. Even a Democrat can tell a whopper.

Time and again we find that supposedly neutral democratic institutions have been corrupted by bias. Debate moderators must check their biases and seek to be scrupulously fair, or they shouldn’t do the job. They should observe strict rules and come from a variety of networks. Most important, they shouldn’t interfere but rather trust voters to make their own decisions. ABC undermined the system for everyone.

I will post on this a little later but don’t be surprised if Tuesday’s debate was not just the last one of this campaign cycle but the last presidential debate broadcast by a major network full stop.

The graph above is taken from the Census Bureau’s report used by the WSJ editorial board.

As I predicted last night’s debate did not decide a great deal. At Reuters Helen Coster and Tim Reid report:

Reuters interviewed 10 people who were still unsure how they were going to vote in the Nov. 5 election before they watched the debate. Six said afterward they would now either vote for Trump or were leaning toward backing him. Three said they would now back Harris and one was still unsure how he would vote.

Harris and Trump are in a tight race and the election will likely be decided by just tens of thousands of votes in a handful of battleground states, many of whom are swing voters like the undecided voters who spoke to Reuters.
Although the sample size was small, the responses suggested Harris might need to provide more detailed policy proposals to win over voters who have yet to make up their minds.

That might present a real conundrum for the Harris campaign. If they can’t win a race based on the Biden-Harris track record and they can’t win an election based solely on “vibes” and aspirations, what’s next? There is not a great deal of time.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal explain why Americans aren’t doing victory laps over the state of the U. S. economy:

Real median earnings for full-time workers last year declined 1.6% and even more for high-school grads (3.3%). This means inflation outpaced wage gains for most low-wage workers. One culprit may be that workers logged fewer hours and less overtime as the labor market started to soften, especially in leisure, hospitality and manufacturing.

The upshot is that real median household income remains lower than in 2019 and has barely grown since 2020.

Americans have short memories but possibly long enough to remember when their wages were growing faster than inflation. Also, we’re spending a lot more on healthcare but not getting a lot more for it:

All told, federal healthcare spending has increased by more than $500 billion since 2019, yet this money hasn’t bought better health or coverage. The Administration has dangled more money for states to expand Medicaid for working-age, healthy adults under ObamaCare. Small employers have responded by paring back their health coverage.

The percentage of uninsured people is the same as it was in 2019 but more people are on Medicare and Medicaid.

It would be interesting to see the chart at the top of the page broken down by income quintile.

To the extent that there was a winner in last night’s presidential debate it was Vice President Kamala Harris. It’s easier to pick the losers. Trump lost by being Trump and we all lost from a nearly content-free debate. Most of all ABC’s moderators lost. They did not cut off microphones when they should have, showed bias, and failed to take note of the complete absence of substantive responses.

I materially agree with the editors of the Wall Street Journal:

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debated each other with the skill, knowledge and dignity befitting a great democracy on Tuesday—well, at least they appeared on stage together. Americans were able to see the candidates their two parties have bequeathed for President, for better or (mostly) worse.

Ms. Harris, less well known than the former President, had the most to gain and our guess is she helped herself. She clearly won the debate, though not because she made a powerful case for her vision or the record of the last four years. Though she kept talking about her “plan” for the economy, she largely sailed along on the same unspecific promises about “the future” that she has since Democrats made her the nominee.

She won the debate because she came in with a strategy to taunt and goad Mr. Trump into diving down rabbit holes of personal grievance and vanity that left her policies and history largely untouched. He always takes the bait, and Ms. Harris set the trap so he spent much of the debate talking about the past, or about Joe Biden, or about immigrants eating pets, but not how he’d improve the lives of Americans in the next four years.

The Vice President had help from the ABC News moderators, who were clearly on her side. They fact-checked only Mr. Trump, several times, though Ms. Harris offered numerous whoppers—on Mr. Trump’s alleged support for Project 2025, Mr. Trump’s views on in-vitro fertilization, and that no American troops are in a combat zone overseas.

Tell that last one to the Americans killed by Iranian proxies in Jordan this year or the U.S. Navy commanders tasked with intercepting Houthi missiles in the Red Sea.

If that so-called debate presages what we have to expect from the next 50 some-odd days of the campaign, the Harris campaign will be one of aspirations alone. Perhaps that will be good enough to prevail.

The editors conclude:

Flush with its candidate’s success, the Harris campaign on Tuesday night called for a second debate in October. But don’t expect her to sit for any in-depth interviews. That would be risky. This was the only scheduled debate between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump, and given what we saw Tuesday, the nation will be grateful if it is the last.

Amen.

I’m seeing tons of unsolicited advice to both candidates on what they need to do or not to do in tonight’s debate. I have found nothing I thought was particularly worthwhile.

Against my reflexes I will probably watch the debate tonight. At least the debate itself. I’ll try to avoid the network commentary to the degree possible.

Anybody have any thoughts?

I think as long as neither candidate falls on his or her face the debate won’t make a great deal of difference and I expect full court presses from various directions claiming that one candidate or another did, in fact, fall on their face.

Like many I was appalled at the school shooting in Georgia last week. I am heartened that the father of the shooter was arrested and indicted as well as the kid. I have a question.

For the last 36 years, since the school shooting perpetrated by Laurie Dann in suburban Chicago, we’ve been aware of a tragic pattern. Parents who hide and coddle their seriously mentally ill children with violent urges. This time we hear that “he was on the FBI’s radar”. Here’s my question. Why isn’t there something in between looking on silently while violent mentally ill kids are enabled by their (probably also mentally ill) parents to go shoot up schools and locking kids up on suspicion? It would seem to me that such kids should, at least, have some sort of mandatory counseling.

If you have a NetFlix subscription you might want to check out Monsieur Spade. Have you ever wondered what happened to Sam Spade after the events of The Maltese Falcon? This limited series answers that question. Apparently, he went to France.

It’s an American-Anglo-French production, intelligently written and produced by Tom Fontana, the writer for St. Elsewhere and Homicide: Life on the Street. Beautifully written (particularly by Clive Owens), acted, and directed, lots of French location shooting.

The graphic at the top of the page is from this report by Aaron Zitner and Adrienne Tong at the Wall Street Journal on which economic proposals from the the campaigns both Democrats and Republicans agree.

As you can see there is agreement on the topmost five proposals. I would like to see some analysis on the budget and fund impact of most of them. I’m skeptical that any of them is prudent. All I can say is if you think food and drug “deserts” are common now, wait until these proposals become law. With respect to taxing tips, why tax income at all? A prebated tax on consumption instead of an income tax would be economically more efficient.