Asking the wrong question at the debate

The values we care about are reflected in what we ask of our leaders

Controlling enslaved Americans during the Civil War. (Library of Congress collection)

When you grow up far from the nation’s centers of population and cultural influence, you get used to being a step or two behind what’s hot. From my childhood home, it was more than 1,700 miles to the big TV network newsrooms that told us what was going on, and it would take more than three days to drive out to where the big studios produced the movies that we saw, eventually — six weeks or so after we read about them in the magazines. People in places like New York and L.A. enjoyed experiences that I couldn’t, and they understood things that I didn’t.

So I’ve always felt some affinity with those whom Donald Trump in 2016 called “the forgotten men and women of our country.” Not that I excuse anybody’s support for a morally bankrupt and mentally unstable shell of a man whose lifelong agenda has been personal aggrandizement at the expense of unsuspecting ordinary folks, nor do I get how a decent person who pays attention to public affairs can endorse Trump’s toxic pursuit of power and his threat to American democracy. But I have empathy for people who feel genuinely alienated from a society that doesn’t seem entirely their own.

Sure, when I was a kid, rich guys who talked big might impress the folks in our community, but then on any given Sunday morning my neighbors would probably be sitting in a church pew, where they would be reminded that virtue was actually represented not by acquired wealth, but how you helped others. They might hear a provocative Bible verse, like what the apostle Paul wrote in the first century to a little band of supporters in what is now Greece: “Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind, regard one another as more important than yourselves.” America would be a better place today if Donald Trump had gotten that message.

You can hardly blame people for finding that sort of teaching hard to embrace, though, because so much of American society is based on striving and self-fulfillment. We want to get ahead, which mostly means we want what money can buy. It’s hard not to judge how well our lives are going by how our paychecks compare to somebody else’s or to what we got last year.

That is reinforced for us in election seasons because candidates usually campaign on pocketbook issues. About 8 in 10 voters tell pollsters these days that the state of the economy is very important to deciding their presidential vote. No wonder, then, that ABC’s David Muir presented a question on the economy first in the presidential debate between Trump and Kamala Harris. It was the right topic, but the way the question was posed — and, more importantly, the way we think about the topic — might suggest why so many Americans are feeling unhappy about the way things are going just now.

The classic articulation of the economy’s power in a presidential race was made by Ronald Reagan in the final week of the 1980 campaign, in his only debate with the incumbent president, Jimmy Carter. In closing remarks, Reagan soberly offered what was instantly understood as the most potent campaign line of modern times. “Ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago?” he said. Carter, who had worked all summer to get himself back into contention, had no effective response. Reagan won by a landslide.

Trump has been trying out various versions of that line all year, as Muir noted at the opening of the recent debate. “Your opponent on the stage here tonight often asks his supporters, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’,” he said to Harris. “When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?”

Harris, in perhaps the only time of the night that she seemed off pace, didn’t directly answer. She instead began to describe her economic agenda. A more able opponent — a Ronald Reagan, say — might have demanded that she answer the question, but Trump instead offered a broad critique of the economy and then wandered off to talk of the border, as he always does, where “people (are) pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.”

There has been plenty of analysis about the debate, which pundits overwhelmingly consider a walkover for Harris. Reading a transcript makes Trump’s performance seem all the more disastrous, because he comes off as almost incoherent. But in our polarized political ecosystem, few voters remain undecided, so even a powerful showing by the vice president won’t necessarily translate into votes where she needs them — that is, in the so-called swing states where a few thousand voters will decide which candidate wins a majority of electoral votes.

And that means a lot of voters are largely asking themselves Ronald Reagan’s question: Am I better off than I was when Trump left the White House?

However potent the question is strategically, though, it’s not how citizens ought to decide their vote. Life isn’t so neat, nor events so predictable, as to deliver progress that might coincide with a political calendar. Weighing matters in four-year chunks invites simplistic thinking and partisan maneuvering that isn’t in the country’s best interests.

Consider, after all, how many times things have gotten worse in America for very good reasons.

During the American Revolution, the economy in the 13 colonies was devastated: Farmers suffered because armies from both sides stole food from the fields, and foreign trade was crippled after the British navy destroyed the patriots’ ships. The so-called “Continental dollar” lost much of its value, with no national government to stabilize it. Soldiers returning to camp after battle were exposed to infectious diseases, leaving smallpox to ravage the forces.

Then, during the Civil War, a different sort of chaos descended, disproportionately affecting the very people the war was fought to protect. Enslaved people suffered more brutality than before the war, historians tell us, as slaveholders desperately tried to maintain control amid fears of insurrection. As the war dragged on and the economy in the South began to collapse, the harsh treatment of slaves was exacerbated by the pressure to produce more commerce through slave labor. The years of war were the worst of times for enslaved Americans, even as the battlefield toll imposed awful penalties on countless households.

Halfway through either war, nobody in America would have answered that their lives were better than a few years before. Yet there is no doubt that the American Revolution was worth fighting, to establish the progressive democracy that has thrived on this continent for almost two and a half centuries; likewise, the fight to rid the nation of slavery and preserve the union was a tragic necessity that yielded a better America.

There was a time not so long ago when Americans seemed to understand that arduous effort was sometimes needed if there was to be hope of better days to follow. Two world wars in the 20^th century demanded a herculean effort not only by fighting troops, but also through the effort at home involving government, industry and millions of American laborers – so that, in Woodrow Wilson’s words, we might “make the world safe for democracy.” Those days were close enough in memory so that when a young World War II veteran, John F. Kennedy, was inaugurated as president in 1961, he was able to assert confidently that the nation was unafraid to shoulder its heavy responsibility of leadership in the world.

Kennedy’s ringing declaration during his Inaugural Address, aimed squarely at Cold War enemies who instilled fear in millions, inspires us yet today: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Can you imagine that either candidate in this year’s presidential race might credibly make such a ringing declaration of American dauntlessness on Inauguration Day 2025? Nor, surely, would Americans respond favorably to a call on that day like what Kennedy so memorably issued moments later: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

No, that would imply the expectation of a level of selflessness that is out of sync with today’s America. It isn’t the sort of call that would come from Trump, who is surely the most self-absorbed of political figures ever to face voters. And rhetoric of that sort from Harris would invite a partisan attack, probably suggesting that she’s a socialist — imagine, expecting people to work for the government! — and would lead to questions about whether she was naïve.

But still. It’s hard not to cling to the dream of restoring the sort of American spirit that is represented in those ringing words of JFK, or a rebirth of the ethos that I experienced far from the centers of power and influence so long ago. It will require a spiritual rebirth — by which I don’t mean necessarily religious spirituality, but rather a spirit based on human connection and care. Certainly that won’t happen if we don’t choose leaders who recognize that the health of the nation and its people cannot be measured in the wealth we accumulate from one election to the next, but rather in the values we share that speak to the advancement of us all. That’s got to be possible, and it could reach everywhere in America, don’t you think?

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THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about *our common ground, this great country. I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.

-REX SMITH