Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - October 1, 2020, Winnipeg, Manitoba C M Y K PAGE A11 THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2020 ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A 11NEWS I WORLD make this your year to explore churchill Your adventure awaits at ComeToChurchill.com NEW YORK — The presidential debate commis- sion says it will soon adopt changes to its format to avoid a repeat of the disjointed first meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Demo- crat Joe Biden. The commission said Wednesday the debate “made clear that additional structure should be added to the format of the remaining debates to ensure a more orderly discussion of the issues.” One possibility being discussed is to give the moderator the ability to cut off the microphone of one of the participants while his opponent is talk- ing, according to a person familiar with the delib- erations who was not authorized to discuss the mat- ter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. The next presidential debate is a town hall for- mat scheduled for Oct. 15 in Miami. Meanwhile, the Nielsen company said that 73.1 million people watched the debate on television, where it was shown on 16 networks. That’s more than any other television event since the Super Bowl, even if it fell short of the 84 million who watched the first debate between Trump and Hil- lary Clinton in 2016. That was the most-watched presidential debate ever. Moderator Chris Wallace struggled to gain con- trol of Tuesday’s debate in Cleveland because of frequent interruptions, primarily by Trump. The candidates interrupted Wallace or their opponent 90 times in the 90-minute debate, 71 of them by Trump, according to The Washington Post. Wallace, of Fox News, pleaded for a more or- derly debate, at one point looking at Trump and saying, “the country would be better served if we allowed both people to speak with fewer interrup- tions. I’m appealing to you, sir, to do that.” “Ask him, too,” Trump said. “Well, frankly, you’ve been doing more inter- rupting than he has,” Wallace said. Biden on Wednesday called the debate “a na- tional embarrassment.” But despite some sugges- tions the final two presidential encounters be can- celled, both campaigns said they expected their candidate to attend. Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said the commission was “only doing this because their guy got pummeled last night. President Trump was the dominant force and now Joe Biden is trying to work the refs.” ABC News’ Martha Raddatz, who moderated one of the three Trump-Clinton debates in 2016, said Wallace was put in nearly an impossible situ- ation. Faced with the same behaviour, she said she might have called a full stop to the debate for a moment to recalibrate. She never had the option, technically, to cut off the microphone of a candidate four years ago, she said. It also wasn’t in the rules that were agreed to in advance by the candidates and commission. “To say, ‘He’s not going to follow the rules so we aren’t, either’ — it’s an unprecedented situation,” Raddatz said. “That was so out of control.” Wallace told The New York Times on Wednes- day he “never dreamt that it would go off the tracks the way it did.” He conceded he didn’t grasp quickly enough that Trump would keep in- terrupting. “I guess I didn’t realize — and there was no way you could, hindsight being 20/20 — that this was going to be the president’s strategy, not just for the beginning of the debate but the entire debate,” he said. Twitter was ablaze with criticism for Wallace early in the debate for losing control of the pro- ceedings. That was illustrated by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who tweeted, “What is Chris Wal- lace doing? He has no control over the debate. He asks a question and lets Trump continue yelling. This is a disgrace.” By the time he was on Morning Joe’ the next morning, Scarborough had cooled off. He called on the debate commission to act. “While it was extraordinarily frustrating, I think all of us need to walk a mile in his shoes before say- ing the morning after, ‘He could have done this, he could have done that,’” Scarborough said. Some of the president’s supporters felt that Wal- lace was too hard on their candidate. Trump him- self suggested he was also debating Wallace, “but that’s no surprise.” Wallace even got some criticism from opinion personalities on his own network. “Trump is de- bating the moderator and Biden,” primetime host Laura Ingraham tweeted during the debate. Another Fox colleague, Geraldo Rivera, ex- pressed more sympathy. “The guy signed up to moderate a debate and he ended up trying to referee a knife fight,” he said. Wallace told the Times he was reluctant to inter- ject more frequently but he grew alarmed when it was clear Trump wouldn’t stop interrupting. “If I didn’t try to seize control of the debate — which I don’t know that I ever really did — then it was going to just go completely off the tracks,” he said. Wallace wasn’t in favour of the power to shut off a candidate’s microphone, saying it may not have stopped Trump. There is some skepticism about what the com- mission can do that is really meaningful. “I’m not sure that there’s a format change that can solve that problem,” said Sen. Pat Toomey, Republican, of battleground state Pennsylvania. Scully moderates the Miami debate, a town hall format where citizens get to ask questions, which may make interruptions more difficult. “Having prepared for these, the town hall is a completely different event in the debate Olympics,” tweeted David Plouffe, an adviser to former Presi- dent Barack Obama. “If Trump brings the same nas- tiness to Florida, it will be doubly painful to watch but it will be doubly painful for him politically.” — The Associated Press DAVID BAUDER Debate commission planning changes to format LANSING, Mich. — Twelve Democratic governors issued a joint statement Wed- nesday defending American democ- racy, vowing every valid ballot will be counted in the election after U.S. Presi- dent Donald Trump sowed distrust dur- ing the first presidential debate. Trump claimed without evidence Tuesday night mail voting — surging in popularity during the coronavirus pandemic — is ripe for fraud, and he refused to say whether he would accept the results. He also called on his back- ers to scrutinize voting procedures at the polls, which critics said could cross into voter intimidation. Without mentioning Trump by name, the governors noted his refusal last week to commit to a peaceful transition of power. “Any efforts to throw out ballots or refuse a peaceful transfer of power are nothing less than an assault on democracy,” they wrote. “There is ab- solutely no excuse for promoting the intimidation or harassment of voters. These are all blatant attempts to deny our constituents the right to have their voices heard, as guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution, and to know the will of the people will be carried out.” Signing the statement were Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom of California, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Ralph Northam of Virginia, Jay Inslee of Washington, Tony Evers of Wisconsin, Tim Walz of Minnesota, Kate Brown of Oregon, Steve Sisolak of Nevada, Mi- chelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico and John Carney of Delaware. The governors said all valid ballots cast in accordance with state and lo- cal laws must be counted and if Trump loses, “he must leave office — period.” They wrote that elections are not “an exercise in controlling power” and that disenfranchising voters “strikes at the very heart” of democracy. “We call on elected leaders at all levels, from both parties, to speak out loudly against such efforts in the weeks ahead,” they said. — The Associated Press DAVID EGGERT 12 Democratic governors vow all votes will be countedL ATROBE, Pa. — If America had an Amtrak rider-in-chief, Joe Biden would be it. The former vice-president, who es- timates he’s logged more than 2.1 mil- lion miles on the rails in his lifetime, added seven more hours to that total Wednesday as his campaign chartered a nine-car private train to tour parts of eastern Ohio and western Pennsylva- nia — key areas to pick up votes if he wants to flip the states from red to blue in November. Biden spent much of the trip inside a roomy, window-lined “conversation car” chatting with supporters he had picked up at stops along the way. He and his wife, Jill, also had their own all-glass space at the back of the train known as the “president’s car.” It’s an appropriate name considering the Democrat’s task at hand: to defeat U.S. President Donald Trump in November. Biden forged a political identity around being an avid Amtrak rider. Starting around the time his first wife and young daughter died in a car crash just before Christmas 1972, he took the train daily from Wilmington, Del., to Washington and then back again to be home with his two young sons. The round trip was 400 km, and he made it every day the Senate was in session dur- ing his decades serving in the chamber. His campaign has used the commute in ads meant to portray Biden as an everyman, and the Amtrak station in Wilmington was renamed in his honour. It’s an image that fits well into Biden’s latest line of attack against Trump: that he, the former vice-president, repre- sents working-class enclaves like his native Scranton, Pa., while Trump em- bodies glitzy Park Avenue in Manhat- tan. Biden frequently says that blue- collar America is tired of being looked down upon — an issue Trump capital- ized on in 2016, when many of his sup- porters believed Democrat Hillary Clinton had disdain for them. Wednesday’s tour took Biden from Cleveland, the site of Tuesday night’s debate, to Alliance, Ohio, and then on to Pittsburgh. From there, he visited Greensburg, Latrobe (birthplace of the banana split) and Johnstown, Pa., — areas whose industrially dependent economies, Biden said, had been devas- tated by Trump’s economic policies. “I used to look out the window — like I did on the way down here — and look into the homes,” Biden told a couple doz- en cheering supporters on a train plat- form at Pittsburgh’s Union Station. “I’d wonder, ‘What’s going on in that house? What are they thinking about?’” During the tour, Biden proclaimed, “I love being on the train,” and called it his “favourite means of transportation.” He also noted, when he first started rid- ing Amtrak, the service didn’t have its own police force, and he recalled help- ing rectify that in the Senate. “It’s not as fast as a helicopter, but I made a lot of family friends on Amtrak,” Biden said. During the day’s first speech at Cleveland’s train station, Biden was in- terrupted by a freight train thundering by. In Alliance, he was jokingly asked if he had enough Amtrak reward points to cover the campaign train. His said he wanted to save his points for an excur- sion after the election is over. During a press conference, he said his time was limited because the train conductor might leave him behind. “We gotta get on this train, or all of you are going to have to run behind it,” Biden joked to reporters. The conductor, 63-year-old Don Lewis, said Wednesday marked his final journey after 46 years with Amtrak. Lewis confessed to being a lit- tle nervous about meeting Biden when the candidate first climbed aboard the chartered train, but he also said he con- sidered himself a Biden supporter. Biden, making his third run for the presidency, announced his first cam- paign for the White House in 1987 at the train station in Wilmington. Then, he and his family posed for pictures off the back of the train. His 2020 cam- paign entertained notions of recreating a similar scene but were unable to, told that Amtrak no longer produces ca- booses. Instead, the Bidens’ private car on Wednesday featured a “Ridin’ with Biden” sign. His campaign also affixed Biden placards and signs urging sup- porters to text “Ohio” to the campaign, which staffers took down when the train crossed into Pennsylvania. Other signs billed the train as the “Build Back Bet- ter Express” a nod to Biden’s plan for post-coronavirus pandemic economic recovery. In his last stop of the night, Biden spoke alongside a train station in Johnstown as a giant freight train rum- bled by. “That train brought me back to my home base every night,” Biden said. “It kept me grounded.” — The Associated Press Biden embarks on Rust Belt train tour WILL WEISSERT ANDREW HARNIK / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Pittsburgh Steelers legend Franco Harris and wife Dana Dokmanovich greet Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden before boarding his train at Amtrak’s Latrobe Train Station, Wednesday in Latrobe, Pa. A_15_Oct-01-20_FP_01.indd A11 2020-09-30 10:39 PM ;