By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden dueled in two different debates Thursday night.

The president focused his attention on speaking to and reassuring the voters who already support him. He reaffirmed their paranoias and counted on their credulity.

Biden directed his attention toward persuading the relatively few undecideds in this race. He tried to talk to suburban Republicans and let them know that he was going to be their president too.

In short, the two candidates for the nation’s highest office devoted their evenings to talking to entirely different audiences.

It made for an interesting night.

It also made for a better debate than the last Biden-Trump tilt, which had all the dignity and intellectual substance of a dumpster fire. That was largely because the president showed up determined to ignore both the rules and basic decency.

The reaction to Trump’s performance in that first showdown was intense. Voters who were not already devoted to him came away from watching that debate convinced that the commander-in-chief could not control himself.

Trump showed more restraint this time around.

There were several reasons for that.

One was that NBC’s Kristen Welker did a better job of managing the action. When the president tried to jump in, filibuster or exceed his time limit, she stood her ground and kept talking to keep him from having a free pass.

Another was that the rules worked. Muting the microphones during the opening statements for each segment was wise and discouraged attempts to hijack the proceedings.

But the third was that the president came to the debate determined to observe minimal standards of decorum. He was on his best behavior for much of the night.

But it wasn’t enough.

Trump came into the night trailing Biden in national polls by anywhere from eight to 12 points. The president also is coming up short in key battleground states that he must – absolutely must – win in order to have any chance of being re-elected.

He needed a knockout.

And he didn’t get it.

Trump was sharper and more disciplined than he ever has been before – including in 2016. He hit Biden hard on the 1994 crime bill, trying to undercut the former vice president’s support among Black voters.

But the president undid whatever good he might have done by proclaiming that he’d done more for “the Black community” than any president, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.

That was one problem Trump had – he couldn’t get out of his own way.

The other was that Biden was stronger than he’d ever been before.

He hammered the president on Trump’s response to the coronavirus by saying, “I would shut down the virus, not the country.”

Biden pounded the president on the issue of corruption, noting that no one knows from whom Trump has taken money: “Release your tax returns or stop talking about corruption.”

And Biden emphasized that this election wasn’t about his family or Trump’s family but about suffering families all across America.

This is not to say that either man made viewers forget Martin Luther King or Ronald Reagan. A master class in oratory the debate wasn’t.

But even in that, there was a difference.

Under pressure, Biden, who has fought a lifelong battle with stuttering, often stumbled and searched for the right word.

Trump, on the other hand, seemed to struggle to find a coherent thought. When pressed, he responded not just with word salad, but chopped word salad – non-sequiturs strung one after another, stray white nationalist phrases and talking points tossed together in an incomprehensible mix.

That’s why he lost the debate.

And perhaps the election.

Trump tried to run as he did in 2016, as an insurgent, an outsider storming the gate.

But he has been the government for the past four years. It’s impossible for him to evade accountability for what that government has done on his watch – particularly given his determination always to dominate the spotlight.

He needed to make a case for his own record.

But he didn’t.

Joe Biden needed to speak to people who have yet to make up their minds.

He did.

Two different candidates with two different strategies.

One worked.

The others didn’t.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

The City-County Observer posted this article without bias, opinion, or editing.