An unexpected moment in last night’s debate

Last night’s debate was chaos. “Pity the transcriptionists,” The New Republic’s Alex Shephard wrote. But there was one surprising and slightly encouraging moment amid the mess: Fox News’s Chris Wallace did ask about climate change.

He hadn’t been planning to do so, according to the list of debate topics he released days earlier. But the absence of climate on the list drew broad criticism. Former evening news anchor Dan Rather expressed his disapproval; The Washington Post’s media columnist, Margaret Sullivan, called the omission “flat-out wrong”; and three dozen Democratic senators, led by Ed Markey, signed a letter demanding that the topic be included. As of 9 p.m. last night, there was still no indication that Wallace intended to modify his plan.

An hour into the train wreck, though, as President Trump was clinging to discredited theories about Joe Biden’s son and Ukraine, something remarkable happened.
“I’d like to talk about climate change,” Wallace said.
“So would I,” said Biden.

Wallace mentioned the forest fires in the West—something he’d omitted in his own reporting in the past, as many people online had pointed out—and asked Trump about his climate record. This yielded three follow-up questions by Wallace, who pressed Trump on his beliefs about climate science and why he “rolled back the Obama Clean Power Plan, which limited carbon emissions and power plants.” Then Wallace asked Biden how he planned to balance climate policy and the economy.

It may sound as though I’m praising Wallace for exceeding the lowest expectations. But it was striking to see a Fox News moderator manage to ask better questions on climate than some of the moderators in the Democratic primary debates. From this, I’d suggest two takeaways: The Democratic debates—particularly the early ones—were even worse on this subject than they were accused of being, and widespread outrage can actually work.