It’s the post-debate shock that’s shocking • New Hampshire Bulletin

In a presidential debate loaded with surreal moments, it’s what happened after the candidates left the stage that stood out.

Back in the CNN studio where the gaggle of pundits roosted, there was wall-to-wall shock. The talking heads couldn’t believe what they had witnessed, nor could the political insiders and party leaders who had the pundits’ attention or at least their cell numbers.

And then it was my turn to be shocked. The debate had played out very close to how I imagined it would – and trust me when I say that I have seen the president in action much less often than the folks gathered in that studio.

But don’t read that as a brag or claim of clairvoyance. Everyone I talked with about the debate before the debate seemed to expect pretty much what we all witnessed. Sure, there were some worst-case scenarios for the president that played out live, but I don’t think that anything we saw from either candidate was unimaginable before 9 pm EST on Thursday night.

For a lot of America, the debate wasn’t really between Donald Trump and Joe Biden anyway; it was Donald Trump vs. “please, God, anybody but Donald Trump” – and the latter came up short. It was always a risky play by the Democrats and the Biden team to run again – and to refuse the smart play of getting a potential successor in the spotlight early and often – and now there’s big trouble right here in River City.

There will be a lot of hand-wringing in the weeks and months to come. And there will be a lot of blame.

The Democratic Party will be one target, rubber-stamping Biden for another term and not giving voters a choice. In New Hampshire, where a proud and effective primary tradition has been torpedoed by the Democratic National Committee and Biden himself, that bitterness will be deep and long-lasting. Others will point the finger at the wayward Republican Party, for putting its weight behind a candidate who is betting the under on a 250-year American experiment. The national news media will take its licks, as it always does, as will the voters themselves for not demanding more and better. And the president will be judged anew for his age and perceived stubbornness – the well-traveled, behind-the-back whispers rising to full-throated, in-your-face panic.

Biden has a few decades on me, but I have a lot of empathy for where he’s at in life. Every day I look in the mirror and the piece of my inner world that feels most real, most authentic, can’t believe that it’s stuck in this middle-age body. That most-real part of me can still rifle a baseball across a diamond, can still stay up all night and function just fine the next day, can still move nimbly through wide-open days. I can do all of that, still, but my body and mind can’t. Watching the president shoot for another term, it’s clear that the disconnect never goes away.

But the national crossroads where we find ourselves ahead of a republic-defining election isn’t about these two men, has never been about these two men.

It is about a nation that no longer has an external purpose to ease the tension of its foundational internal divide.

Back in 1987, when I was just a kid, I latched on to a Ronald Reagan quote that I felt said something important about the nature of ideological divides. He said: “Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”

I have thought about these words from time to time in the decades since, as our nation has faced acts of foreign aggression, the threat of a third world war, and global terrorism. But recent events that should be of universal concern – primarily climate change and a global pandemic – have shown me that Reagan and I were probably being naive. Sometimes the divide is so wide that old bridges just fall into the abyss.

We’ve never adequately addressed our foundational internal divisions, and without a temporarily unifying external threat, we are adrift. It’s clear now, as the joke goes, that the call is coming from inside the house.

I don’t know what the fix is, exactly. I don’t know who the candidate is who can build a bridge so broad and open that people from all edges feel compelled to walk across, just a little bit at a time, to see if it can hold us all.

But I hope, and I wait.