OPINION: The future of American politics was at the debate, but it wasn’t on the stage

At one point during an answer on the economy, Biden brought up COVID and seemed to lose his train of thought. The seconds passed like hours, until he blurted out, “Look, we finally beat Medicare.”

For his part, Trump was on top of his responses, but he badly mangled his facts. He claimed he had “virtually nothing to do” with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and said “the Charlottesville story” that neo-Nazis marched in the Virginia town in 2017 was “debunked all over the place.” It wasn’t

He claimed he reduced the cost of insulin for seniors. “I did that,” he said. In reality, Biden did that.

The rest of the time, the two traded insults and accusations and called each other liars and losers. At one point, they fought over Biden’s golf handicap. It was the debate Americans dreaded between the candidates they didn’t want.

Video from CNN Presidential Debate

But before the disaster unfolded, a parade of younger, fitter, and entirely more able politicos appeared in the spin room to make the case that their guy should win in November.

There was California’s 56-year-old Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, tall and tan with a sweep of salty dark hair that rose away from his face in a swoop that you don’t see in nature. His teeth were just white and straight enough that you could cast him as the president in a movie if he wasn’t so clearly already aiming for the job.

The governor name-dropped world leaders like most people name-drop movie stars. “I was in China right before AIPAC, I had a chance to talk to President Xi …”

And then he went on to make the case for Biden and against Trump more effectively than Biden ever did.

“It’s the easiest choice of my life, it’s the difference between light and darkness. Their records are not even comparable,” he said of Biden.

He told a crush of reporters that he thinks the presidential contest starts tonight — and he would be right if he were talking about the 2028 election.

Before Newsom held court on the floor of McCamish Pavilion, a literal basketball court on the Georgia Tech campus, Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp stood in nearly the same spot, with the same national and international press corps stretching their microphones toward him to capture what he had to say.

When he was asked about Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 elections, 60-year-old Kemp spoke for himself. “Look, I followed the law and the Constitution. That’s what I have done in the past and that’s what I’m going to do in the future.”

He suggested Trump focus on the future and Americans’ pocketbooks. “Americans cannot afford another four years of Joe Biden’s policies,” Kemp said.

Speaking of the future, Kemp is rumored to be a potential presidential candidate four years from now — as he should be. He’s a second-term Republican governor in a battleground state with a 65% approval rating. What else do you need to know? Maybe that he is also the rare Republican who stood up to Trump and lived to tell about it. He refused to go along with Trump’s demand to overturn the 2020 election and Georgia voters, including plenty of Democrats, reelected him for it.

Moments after Kemp spoke to reporters, Georgia’s Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock strode past. In the same year that Kemp won reelection in Georgia, Warnock did, too, with a mix of dignity and likability that even some Republicans were drawn to. The 54-year-old Democratic senator is also the senior pastor at Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. The presidential announcement writes itself.

Across the hall from Warnock was 45-year-old U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, a fierce Trump surrogate who, as a Black Republican, stands out as a new voice for Trump without echoing Trump’s most insulting tropes.

Upstairs from the spin room was Minnesota’s U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a 64-year-old Democrat (a baby these days!) who ran for president in 2020 and, let’s be honest, may as well run again. She’s a woman and a policy wonk and somehow folksy at the same time. The Democrats could clearly do worse.

Before the debate started, I had an unfamiliar twinge as I watched those men and women throw themselves into the arena of American politics with fervor and enthusiasm and expertise and heart. I think the twinge I felt was … optimism.

But all of that is down the road. What’s just ahead of American voters in 2024, unfortunately, were the two men at the center of the stage. And I’m not sure how we should feel about that.