Debates

It’s happening. Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump will debate. Of course, the Biden team is making sure the debates are dominated by the left-wing media and held in studios with no citizens present. Given this surprisingly undemocratic arrangement, it occurred to me it might be useful to look at the most famous candidate debates in American history. In 1858, while running for the US Senate in Illinois, incumbent Senator Stephen A. Douglas agreed to debate his opponent, Abraham Lincoln, seven times — once in each congressional district in which they had not yet spoken. Douglas was frustrated. Lincoln had spoken in Springfield and Chicago one day after Douglas and just torn apart all of Douglas’s arguments leaving him with no chance to respond.

It’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that Gavin Newsom is shifting toward the middle in preparation for a national campaign. The only question is how soon that campaign will emerge — and whether his decisions will lead to animosity from the cultural left that could bar him from the Democratic nomination, or help him find success with more mainstream voters found in states outside of California. The most prominent recent decision was Newsom’s decision to veto a bill requiring parental affirmation of trans identification in the context of child custody disputes — one that was passed by a party line vote of 57-16 in the Democrat-dominated California Assembly.