The Story Biden Ought to Be Telling in This Debate

The mythology of the presidential debate — as a kind of civic single combat, mano a mano, with the nation’s future at stake — has its origins in the fall of 1960, when John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon faced off four times on live television. Decades later, the New Yorker writer and editor Roger Angell still could summon the feeling of “common pride and excitement,” the sense that the country had witnessed “something complex, historic and profoundly American.”

The enterprise, since then, has gone sour and flat, like so much else in our political life. CNN, which will host the first of two debates between President Biden and Donald Trump, is doing its best to gin up the old excitement, but the general feeling is one of unease…