Debate THIS!

President Biden took the imitative and challenged Donald Trump to a debate - and then another debate - after Trump insisted that the President would never agree to any debates.  Biden was forceful in laying down the gauntlet and made it clear that he wanted to challenge him - and with no studio audience, and outside the parameters of the rules of the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD).

A lot of pundits have suggested that Biden should not debate Trump and that it's not in his interest to do so because Trump will crosstalk him and make baseless, knee-jerk accusations against the President of doing what Trump himself does constantly.  But Trump - who skipped all of the Republican presidential primary debates in 2023 and early 2024 - said that he wanted to debate President Biden and suggested that Biden would not be up to the task and thus avoid the prospect t make Biden look weak.  Biden called Trump's bluff.  

It won't be an Oxford-style debate - the closest we ever came to that was when there was a presidential debate at the University of Mississippi (get it?) - but it will likely be a more honest tête-à-tête then the stilted, dry, formatted debates the CPD has given us for the past thirty-odd years.  Such debates, more often than not, are joint news conferences, not a genuine exchange of ideas and proposals,  and they are a far cry from the original debates of the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon campaign.  Yes, the commission had its rules, but Trump proved that rules were made to be broken, and he shattered them beyond repair.  So let's have it - June 27, no holds barred, mano a mano.   

Oh yeah, the Commission on Presidential Debates was formed in an ad hoc manner in 1988 for the second presidential debate between Vice President George Bush and Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis when the League of Women Voters, the organization that had sponsored the debates before, no longer wished to be involved in what they thought was a sham.   

Man, that's cold.