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‘WHAT PEOPLE WANTED’ LEE BANVILLE, PROFESSOR AND DIRECTOR OF THE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM, UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA Often these spectacles of American politics come down to some memorable moment –
a rhetorical jab that bloodies an opponent, an unforced error that dogs a campaign for weeks. The _first 30 minutes of Biden’s performance_ in his June debate with Trump is just the latest
in a long line of pivotal moments that can throw a campaign off. But when does a fumbled phrase elevate into a political crisis or a factual slip turn into lost votes? And what from
tonight’s historic encounter will merit more than a couple of TikToks making fun of politicians? We should know in the next day or so, but one may be when Trump claimed that ending the
constitutional protection for abortion in Roe v. Wade _had returned the issue to the states_ – a move, he said, “Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative,
they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote. And that’s what happened.” Harris then turned that phrase “what people wanted” back on the former
president. “You want to talk about this is what people wanted? Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room
because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that. A 12- or
13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that,” _Harris said_. It was a moment of policy, but also a personal moment, and hit on a major
theme of the race. That is the kind of moment we have seen stand out in the past: President Gerald Ford wrongly declaring _Eastern Europe free of Soviet domination_; President Ronald Reagan
deftly dispatching concerns about his age with a _well-placed quip_ about the youth and inexperience of his 56-year-old rival; President George H.W. Bush looking at his watch repeatedly
during a 1992 town hall debate. I was lucky enough to work on a 2008 documentary – “_Debating our Destiny_” – where the moderator of 12 presidential debates and my former boss, the late Jim
Lehrer, interviewed many of those candidates about debates. The first President Bush was one of our favorites. “You look at your watch and they say that he shouldn’t had any business running
for president. He’s bored. He’s out of this thing, he’s not with it and we need change,” _Bush told us later_. “Now, was I glad when the damn thing was over. Yeah. And maybe that’s why I
was looking at it, only 10 more minutes of this crap.” Now, Bush might have been the funny one, but it was former President Bill Clinton who, after mulling it over, offered some good insight
into why some debate moments stick: “The reason the watch thing hurt so badly was it tended to reinforce the problem he had in the election.”