"Trump got his ass kicked in these debates, so they want to change the rules. It’s like a football team that can’t pass, so they want to make it illegal to pass."

Said Stuart Stevens, "who was Mitt Romney’s chief strategist in 2012 and who worked against Trump’s reelection in 2020," quoted in "Trump blows a hole in 2024 presidential debates/The RNC's move stamps former president’s imprint on future debates" (Politico). 

What is the rule change that is the equivalent of outlawing passing in football? What was Trump so bad at that it corresponds to "a football team that can’t pass"? 

What Trump opposed was the use of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which he accuses of bias, to set up the debates, so I think the analogy should be something more like a football team that believes the referees systematically favor their opponents.

Republicans have long complained that debates and their media moderators are biased against them — what Saul Anuzis, a former chair of the Michigan Republican Party, called “a very serious frustration among Republicans in general, and many of the candidates in the campaigns, that we don’t necessarily get a fair deal.”

I pause my reading this long article and just search the page for "candy." Finding none, I decide not to plow through the entire text. 

ADDED: Stuart Stevens was Mitt Romney’s chief strategist when Romney suffered the most egregious display of moderator bias in the history of televised presidential debates, the thing that made me do the search for "candy." Speaking of getting your ass kicked in the debate! And now he turns around and trashes Trump for directly speaking out about the bias. I guess what Stevens wants is for Republican candidates to endure and just keep trying harder... or maybe enjoy the pleasures of serving in a party that is systematically in the minority.

"I don't think I've ever heard Althouse use the word 'destroys' in reference to a debate."

Said The Vault Dweller in last night's debate conversation, after I said "Biden is doing well. I thought he destroyed Bernie on the issue of saving the banks."

Here's the part of the transcript I was talking about. The moderator, Ilia Calderon asked Sanders about his vote against bailouts following the 2008 financial crisis. Sanders stood by his vote based on the "illegal behavior" the banks engaged in and because of his concern about "massive income and wealth inequality." The "working person" should not "suffer" for something they did not control.

Then:

BIDEN: Had those banks all gone under, all those people Bernie says he cares about would be in deep trouble. Deep, deep trouble. All those little folks, we would have gone out of business. They would find themselves in position where they would lose everything they had in that bank, whether it was $10 or $300 or a savings account. This was about saving an economy. And it did save the economy. And the banks paid back. And they paid back with interest....

I'm skipping some squabbling, and then:

BIDEN: Look, the fact of the matter is that if, in fact, the banks had all been -- gone under, we would be in a great depression. We would have not -- how do you get out of that? Now Bernie is saying that I guess he's going to do a wealth tax or something, that the top 1 percent could pay for everything. And they should pay for everything that occurred. We were talking about tens and hundreds of billions of dollars. That's what this was about. And the fact was that it saved the economy from going into a depression. After we passed the Recovery Act, which I was the one that went out and got the three votes to get it changed, that had $900 billion in it and was the thing that kept us from going into a great depression. 

BIDEN: "Number one, no more subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, no more drilling on federal lands, no more drilling, including offshore, no ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period, ends, number one."

The man on the moderate side of the one-on-one debate said something so extreme.

Joe Biden: “no more, no new fracking” in my administrationhttps://t.co/gnHCex8NPv pic.twitter.com/bwvLaU2VyB

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 16, 2020

Here's the full transcript of the debate. That line came from the section of the debate that was about climate change. Biden had called climate change the "single greatest threat to our national security," because of the "great migrations" that will, he believes, occur.  The moderator Jake Tapper had asked him why his "climate plan" has a $1.7 trillion when Sanders's plan is priced at $14 trillion.

"Is your plan ambitious enough?" Tapper prodded, and Biden talked about mass transportation and asserted: "We can lay down the tracks where nothing can be changed by the next president or following president, the one beyond that." 

Then it was Bernie's turn, and he said we need "courage" to "take on the fossil fuel industry" which has been "lying for years" about climate change and ought to "be held criminally accountable." And "It's not a question of money" because it's "a world-changing event."

With that challenge, given a chance to respond, Biden said the line in the post title:

Number one, no more subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, no more drilling on federal lands, no more drilling, including offshore, no ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period, ends, number one.