The Presidential Debate 2024

While, technically, the history of presidential debates began in 1960, debates in general started well before that. The first debates were, indeed, public, since everything humans did, including pooping and copulation, was public. And yes, there was usually a topic at hand (fighting over food or women or accusing someone of pushing them into a pile of mammoth poop). But, since the idea of persuasive arguments hadn’t yet been invented, rocks to the head took their place. The winner was the person who remained alive. All in all, it was a relatively efficient way to solve things for everyone but the ones who ended up dead.

The art of debate started in Greece in 500 BC. Over time, debates became popular in most civilizations, people becoming mesmerized by the idea of this way more elegant form of discourse. While the most intelligent and erudite folks in society honed their debate talents, regular folks continued to just yell at each other, use rude hand signals and yell “Whaddaya nuts?” when confronted with opinions that differed from theirs.

Thousands of years later, debates, and specifically presidential debates, necessitated a moderator, a lot of unduly fancy electronic equipment, a crew, a studio audience, lecturns with microphones and water, and a set of rules that both parties agreed to ahead of time.

This worked fairly well untill the three presidential debates that preceded the 2016 election, in which one of the candidates broke most of the rules of the debate, and possibly a couple pieces of furniture, but won the election anyway.

At the next set of presidential debates preceding the 2020 election, that same candidate assessed his performance back in 2016 and, instead of a repeat of such performance to assure a second win, he decided to ramp up his offensive behavior. This time around, in addition to his political rival, he also verbally beat up the debate moderator, the rival candidate’s son, the United States, and any number of entities not associated with politics. He also mocked his rival’s intelligence and interrupted him throughout the evening. He lost the election.  

For the third set of presidential debates, starting tomorrow night at 9 PM, those who planned the debate realized that, in lieu placing him in a small cage with a muzzle, they would have to change the rules of the game. And so, for the first time in 64 years, we have a new set of rules to accommodate a presidential candidate who refuses to be toilet-trained.

For those of you who haven’t been following the new rules, Life in the Boomer Lane now shares them with you:

1. There will be no live studio audience, thereby assuring that the candidate of issue cannot direct his followers an order, let’s say, for example, to storm the US Capital in the event that things weren’t going well for him.

2. Muted microphones will ensure each candidate’s uninterrupted speaking time, although a lot of people have probably been scrambling to master lip-reading, in ordeer to glean the ravings of said candidate while his opponent is speaking.

3. Podiums and positions will be decided by a coin toss. This has already been accomplished. Biden won the toss (choosing tails) and will occupy the podium to the right, most likely chosen because of a boatload of research about which direction is favorable to human attention span, as well as its proximity to the bathroom. The opposing candinate, for that reason, has the final closing argument. So far, the only comment that said candidate has noted about this is, “The coin toss, like both the 2016 election and Germany’s loss in WWII, has been 100% rigged.”

4. No props or pre-written notes will be permitted. It isn’t clear whether one of the candidate’s hands will be examined before the debate starts. Said candidate has already declared on Fox News that he intends to get “a lot of religious and patriotic tattoos on his hands and arms” before the debate and “nobody better get too close to him or else.”

5. Each candidate will be given a pen and a pad of paper with which to take notes. LBL could find no wording in the event one of the candidates used his notepaper to make spitballs and throw them at the other candidate.

6. Each candidate will be given a bottle of water. This, in itself, can result in any number of unfortunate events. LBL hopes that all of those possibilities have been considered at length.

LBL doesn’t know if that old saying about death and taxes being the only things that are unavoidable is actually true, but she does know that if you give humans a bunch of rules , the first thing many of them will do is to figure out a way to break them. It goes without saying that this evening’s debate will be a true test of that theory.