We have all heard endless speculation in the run-up to the first of two presidential campaign debates Thursday regarding how well each of the presumed opposing candidates will "perform" according to a rapidly vanishing number of undecided voters.
But perform according to what criteria?
Style points for focus group-tested responses to predictable gotcha character assaults?
Evidence of cognitive and physical fitness essential for domestic and global leadership?
Comparative achievements and failures during back-to-back administrations?
Demonstrated commitments to forward-looking priorities most citizens agree about?
At a time of arguably the most politically polarized electorate in modern history, the spectacle will predictably attract an enormous television audience.
Will they see that suspiciously jacked-up Joe Biden who was witnessed yelling out his staff-scripted State of the Union address be able to make it through a 90-minute, unteleprompted, hopefully unmedicated, stand-up slugfest without experiencing apparent mumbling befuddlement or brain freeze?
Will an unscripted Donald Trump address the entire nation — not just his already strong base — concentrating attention on why this election will restore and advance proven economic and security policies?
Having said this, don't expect this event to hallmark a civil exchange between two mutually respectful adversaries in the interest of healing rancorous division. That simply isn't going to occur where each has clear disdain for the other.
We can safely bet that incumbent President Biden will make Trump's felon-branding convictions, recently scored in a sham Manhattan court, a banner character issue — most particularly directed to a dwindling number of undecided voters.
Just as predictably, fully expect former President Trump to fire back with a large arsenal of far more scandalously lethal Biden family corruption charges ranging from Hunter Biden's felony gun purchase conviction and upcoming tax evasion hearings to bank record and whistleblower evidence of foreign influence peddling with compromising and potentially treasonous national security implications.
And whereas the Biden camp will cite the Jan. 6 Capitol riots as evidence of Trump as a "threat to democracy," in hopes of provoking a rant on so-called unfounded claims of a botched 2020 election, this is certain to invite a reminder that Joe had previously not been all that forthcoming about alleged criminal activities exposed on son Hunter's "laptop from hell" in their previous presidential debate.
In doing so, Biden had cited claims by 51 former intel officials who — as prompted by his then-campaign adviser Antony Blinken — falsely dismissed its content as "Russian disinformation."
Regarding policy issues, the Biden prep team led by his former chief of staff and three-decade Democrat veteran of presidential debates, Ron Klain, will use the upcoming debate to hold Trump accountable in helping to overturn Roe v. Wade (which allowed late-term abortions) in what Democrats have believed a winning argument.
Trump will counter by repeating support for state voters and legislatures to determine such decisions while also expressing personal advocacy for certain limitations — including a 16-week abortion ban with exceptions — which generally tends to fall in line with prevalent opinions.
On the other side, Biden and Democrat policies provide enormously wide and vulnerable targets of opportunity for Trump and his supporters: raging inflation along with rising food and housing costs; warfare against fossil-fueled energy independence; an open southern border, which has distributed more than 10 million unvetted illegal migrants including hundreds of suspected terrorists throughout the country; epidemic death rates from Chinese and Mexican narcotics; and escalating violent and property crimes attributed to lax law enforcement and prosecution practices.
Add to this numerous international policy failures including the Biden Afghanistan withdrawal debacle which left 13 U.S. service personnel dead and abandoned thousands of supporters along with $8 billion of advanced weaponry and the highly strategic Bagram Air Base to Taliban control.
Many will also appreciate relatively much more peaceful times during the Trump years before weak, confused Biden foreign policies arguably emboldened Russia to savagely invade Ukraine and Tehran-funded Hamas to launch unthinkably brutal Oct. 7 atrocities that killed 1,200 Israeli citizens.
All of these disasters have been supported by Iran profits and weaponry financed by released Trump sanctions on global oil purchases — communist China in particular.
Lacking any domestic or international policy achievements to brag about leaves the Biden campaign with little more than an ongoing lawfare strategy to illegally disqualify, bankrupt, and imprison their opponent, which appears to be having an exactly opposite consequence.
Record numbers of small, first-time donors along with previous Democrat-leaning deep-pocket individuals and corporations have consequentially given the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee a previously unprecedented financial advantage.
According to a recent survey from Emerson College and The Hill, following bogus Manhattan convictions, Trump is now edging out Biden in six critical battleground states: Arizona (47%-43%), Georgia (45%-41%), Michigan (46%-45%), Nevada (46%-43%), Pennsylvania (47%-45%), and Wisconsin (47%-44%).
The same poll showed Trump and Biden dead even at 45% each in Minnesota, which has backed a Republican only three times since the onset of the Great Depression, while a Fox poll also shows the two tied evenly at 48% in formerly deep-blue Virginia.
A RealClearPolitics poll similarly finds the same six key swing states favoring Trump by margins ranging from 0.2 percentage points in Michigan to 5.7 percentage points in Nevada.
Whether personally liking or hating either candidate, ultimately count on the upcoming debate spectacle to change few ballot box decisions of the majority of voters who care more about comparing real issue influences of the two administrations upon their lives and future.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.