Special Report: The Last Presidential Debate Part 2

(Disclaimer: La Tonique Media LLC does not represent any political ideology. While we do not espouse any political beliefs, we do seek to provide a balance perspective by incorporating voices from both sides of the political spectrum.)

By Stepan Gauvreau and JTTC

This is Part 2 of our Special Report on the last presidential debate. Please check out Part 1 (here) and then Part 3 (coming soon).

(Editorial Note: While the interpretation of the debate may be influenced by an individual’s partisan belief, we wish to provide the reader with the resources to come to their own conclusions. In an effort to do this, a transcript of the debate can be found here and a video recording of it can be found below.)

American Families

MODERATOR TOPIC QUESTION: “One of the issues that’s most important to them is healthcare, as you both know. Today, there was a key vote on a new Supreme Court Justice, Amy Coney Barrett, and healthcare is at the center of her confirmation fight. Over 20 million Americans get their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. It’s headed to the Supreme Court and your administration, Mr. President, is advocating for the court to overturn it. If the Supreme Court does overturn that law, there’s 20 million Americans could lose their health insurance almost overnight. So what would you do if those people have their health insurance taken away?”

TRUMP (answered first):

·         “Through the legislature, I terminated the individual mandate. That is the worst part of Obamacare, as we call it. The individual mandate where you have to pay a fortune for the privilege of not having to pay for bad health insurance, I terminated. It’s gone.”

·          “I’d like to terminate Obamacare, come up with a brand new, beautiful healthcare.” 

·          “we have 180 million people out there that have great private healthcare. Far more than we’re talking about with Obamacare. Joe Biden is going to terminate all of those policies.”

·         “Pre-existing conditions will always stay.”

-On raising the federal minimum wage to $15

·         “He said we have to help our small businesses by raising the minimum wage. That’s not helping. I think it should be a state option. Alabama is different than New York. New York is different from Vermont. Every state is different.”

BIDEN:

·         "What I’m going to do is pass Obamacare with a public option, and become Bidencare. The public option is an option that says that if you in fact do not have the wherewithal, if you qualify for Medicaid and you do not have the wherewithal in your state to get Medicaid, you automatically are enrolled, providing competition for insurance companies.”

·          “the idea that I want to eliminate private insurance, the reason why I had such a fight with 20 candidates for the nomination was I support private insurance. That’s why. Not one single person with private insurance would lose their insurance under my plan, nor did they under Obamacare. They did not lose their insurance unless they chose they wanted to go to something else.”

·         “10 million people have lost their private insurance, and he wants to take away 22 million more people who have it under Obamacare and over 110 million people with pre-existing conditions.”

·         “It’s going to cost over $750 billion over 10 years to do it. And they’re going to have lower premiums. You can buy into the better plans, the cheaper plans, lower your premiums, deal with unexpected billing, and have your drug prices drop significantly.”

-On raising the federal minimum wage to $15

·         “I do, because I think one of the things we’re going to have to do is we’re going to have to bail them out too. We should be bailing them out now, those small businesses.”

·         “These first responders we all clap for as they come down the street because they’ve allowed us to make it. What’s happening? They deserve a minimum wage of $15. Anything below that puts you below the poverty level. And there is no evidence that when you raise the minimum wage, businesses go out of business.”

ANALYSIS:

For the most part, this section of the debate devolved into bickering, name calling and finger pointing. The policy points that the candidates did make were almost entirely focused on healthcare. More specifically the Affordable Care Act commonly known as Obamacare. Unsurprisingly, both candidates committed to keeping protections for people with pre-existing conditions found in Obamacare given this portion of the law has widespread public support. Trump did manage to work with Republicans in effectively repealing the individual mandate by making the noncompliance penalty $0. However, the claim that he will repeal and replace Obamacare seems dubious at best. The last effort to replace the legislation failed in 2017 and there has been no comprehensive bill or plan presented since. Trump on Saturday released an executive order concerning healthcare. The order pontificates at length about the failures of Obamacare, how great of a job repealing the individual mandate was, how much money the administration has given to various scientific research organizations, promises better healthcare and lower drug prices. Unfortunately, it offers no actual policy description on how to replace Obamacare. The section titled “Policy” only contains one sentence “It has been and will continue to be the policy of the United States to give Americans seeking healthcare more choice, lower costs, and better care and to ensure that Americans with pre-existing conditions can obtain the insurance of their choice at affordable rates.”.

(Senator John McCain votes no on the Republican sponsored American Health Care Act otherwise known as the “skinny repeal” of the Affordable Care Act, July 28, 2017.)

(NBC)

Biden on the other hand offered a more substantial policy-oriented argument but was also incorrect on an important issue. Somewhere between 2.6-4.7 million people involuntarily lost their health coverage if it did not comply with minimum legal standards. While most of these people would gain coverage again under Obamacare, the notion that nobody lost their private health insurance unless they chose to give it up is plainly untrue. Furthermore, the claim that Trump wishes to take away coverage for 110 million Americans is also untrue if Trump’s assertion that pre-existing conditions protections would remain is sincere. To be fair Trump’s assertion that Biden wishes to eliminate private insurance altogether is also equally untrue. While not the only candidate Biden was the only major contender in the Democratic primary (the other two being Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) to have shunned Medicare for All from the start. Perhaps most meaningfully Biden has published an extensive detailed policy proposal on healthcare. In comparison, the executive order released about the President’s healthcare plan is primarily about the goals and purpose of the order, with little substance on achieving its objectives. Both candidates managed to turn the section into a blame game but there is a demonstrative difference between a declaration of intent and an actual publicized plan for achieving an objective.  

The last topic they covered was whether the federal minimum wage should be raised to $15. Biden firmly committed to this increase. On the other hand, Trump did not outright say no but instead gave a somewhat normal political answer of we’ll see. However, he did make the argument that the minimum wage increase could be disastrous in some regions. Neither candidate was entirely right. In the late 90’s political scientists found that on average roughly 48.4 businesses out of 10,000 failed in a year following a minimum wage increase. The impact of minimum wage seems unclear or even negligible as the average failure rate in other years that did not see an increase was about 47.6 out of 10,000. In support of Trump’s claim, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office concluded that raising the federal minimum wage to $15 would cost about 1.3 million low wage jobs. It’s important to note that this study also found that it would boost the wages of about 17 million and move 1.3 million above the poverty line. Unfortunately, the study acknowledges the uncertainty of this number giving odds of 2 in 3 that the loss would be anywhere from effectively 0 to 3.7 million, that’s a large range.

This section of the debate quickly descended into bickering reminiscent of the first debate with topics like immigration getting almost no policy points made. The only clear policy point being Biden’s commitment to creating a path to citizenship for asylum seekers. The rest of the discussion was dominated by insults regarding the Obama administration's failed immigration reform and the Trump administration’s policy of separating families at the border and then in some cases losing the parents to the children who were separated, making the children effectively orphans. It was an exhausting segment.

Race in the US

MODERATOR TOPIC QUESTION: “I want to talk about the way Black and Brown Americans experience race in this country. Part of that experience is something called the talk. It happens regardless of class and income, parents who feel they have no choice, but to prepare their children for the chance that they could be targeted, including by the police, for no reason other than the color of their skin. Mr. Vice President, in the next two minutes, I want you to speak directly to these families. Do you understand why these parents fear for their children?”

TRUMP:

·         “Nobody has done more for the black community than Donald Trump. And if you look, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln, possible exception, but the exception of Abraham Lincoln, nobody has done what I’ve done.”

·         “President Obama would never give them long-term funding and I did. 10 year long-term funding and I gave them more money than they asked for because I said,”

·         “I saved Historically Black Colleges and Universities.”

·          “Pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon.” I said, “That’s a horrible thing.” And they were marching down the street. And that was my first glimpse of Black Lives Matter, I thought it was a terrible thing. As far as my relationships with all people, I think I have great relationships with all people. I am the least racist person in this room.

BIDEN (answered first):

·         “I never had to tell my daughter if she’s pulled over, make sure she puts… For a traffic stop. “Put both hands on top of the wheel and don’t reach for the glove box because someone may shoot you.” But a Black parent, no matter how wealthy or how poor they are, has to teach their child, “When you’re walking down the street, don’t have a hoodie on when you go across the street.”

·         “The fact of the matter is, there is institutional racism in America. And we have always said, we’ve never lived up to it, that we hold these truths to be self-evident, all men and women are created equal. Well, guess what, we have never, ever lived up to it. But we’ve always constantly been moving the needle further and further to inclusion, not exclusion.”

·         “I’m offering $20 billion to states to change their state laws to eliminate minimum mandatories and set up drug courts. No one should be going to jail because they have a drug problem. They should be going to rehabilitation, not to jail.”

(Protesters at the White House in response to the death in Minneapolis police custody of George Floyd, in Washington, D.C., May 31.)

(Jonathan Ernst | Reuters)

ANALYSIS: (in progress)

The topic of race in America was not a topic either candidate performed particularly well in. For Biden, this was represented in his proverbial chickens coming home to roost. These chickens being the outcome of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. While the crime bill was passed with bipartisan support in the House and some bipartisan support in the Senate, it has become widely panned. This has largely been a result of the way that it escalated mass incarceration in the United States and targeted people of color, specifically Black Americans. Furthermore, it led to mandatory minimums for drug sentencing sending otherwise non criminally inclined offenders to taxpayer-funded prisons. There is also the assertion Biden made that the Obama administration reduced the federal prison by 38,000 prisoners. This is plainly false as the federal prison system only shrunk by about 10,000 prisoners. However, to the Obama administration's credit, that kind of fall in federal prisoners hasn’t occurred since Jimmy Carter. On the same topic, it’s important to note that Biden wasn’t actually president so both the achievements and the faults of the Obama administration are not Biden’s alone. Biden is the democratic candidate, not Obama. Biden was an important driving force behind the bill, not Obama. Biden stated that he has regretted what the law caused and made a policy point to reform the law to better address mandatory minimums and drug-related offenses. Whether this regret and commitment to change is enough is for the victims of the 1994 crime bill to decide. 

For Trump, this section was almost painful to watch. To give credit where credit is due the Trump administration did sign into law a bill that included funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities. However, the President of the United States doesn’t actually make policy as that is the duty of the legislature. The President is the head of the Executive Branch so they only have the power to enforce laws, not create them. Furthermore, the bill that included this funding was passed with bipartisan support. Also, funding for these universities was provided by the Obama administration with HBCU growing by over 1 million students during that period. Unless Trump intends to take credit for the initial lapse in funding for these colleges and universities, then it seems disingenuous to take credit for the law being passed. The President gave a normal politically evasive question of whether the Constitution First Amendment right of Black Americans should be respected by the sitting president. Instead, Trump deflected by talking about his aversion to the Black Lives Matter movement and proclaimed himself as the least racist person in the room. While there has been a political backlash to the BLM movement, the assertion that Donald Trump is the least racist person in the room is absurd. Given that he made no other actual policy commitments or even comments we are left to believe that somehow continuing already in place funding for HBCU is his testament to race. The idea that this is even remotely close to Lincoln ending slavery and more important than the Johnson administration passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is beyond ludicrous. 

Biden’s record on race is certainly jaded, especially given the effects of the 1994 Crime Bill. However, Biden did admit responsibility, at minimum, verbalized remorse and made a policy commitment to rectify the consequences of his actions. On the other hand, Trump did probably the most insulting thing he could have done, denied any responsibility in any capacity. Trump is a man who’s racial issues have followed him for decades. This included having his corporation sued by the Nixon administration in the early ‘70s for Violating the Fair Housing Act for refusing to rent to Black tenants. These racial issues haven’t gotten better in the decades since then with Trump publicly attacking federal congresswomen as a result of their ethnicities, and even retweeting openly white supremacist videos. While that video was removed, it speaks volumes of either Trump’s racial attitudes or his total carelessness. It is certainly possible for people to change their racial attitudes, just look at the work of Daryl Davis. However, without taking any responsibility in any manner and by not putting forward any semblance of policy going forward it’s hard to look at Trump as the least racist person in the room; especially when he doesn’t look like the least racist person on the stage.

Part 3: Climate Change and Corruption (here).

JTTC and Stepan are political writers for La Tonique.