Commentary: Why next week’s Biden-Trump faceoff is so novel — and what it means for future presidential debates
Next week’s debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump will be novel for many reasons. It will be the first debate between a current and a former U.S. president. It will be the first featuring a convicted felon. It will be the first conducted before either major party has formally picked a nominee. But perhaps most importantly, it harks to an earlier time in presidential campaign politics when debates were neither typical nor expected, and when they occurred, they did so to serve specific needs of the candidates, rather than as a form of public service.
