Posted on 09/26/2016 10:49:16 PM PDT by EinNYC
Hillary Clinton won that debate. Or, rather, Donald Trump lost it.
Here’s what I mean by that. Normally, what really lingers in the mind after a presidential debate is an own goal. Think of Al Gore looking like an uptight prig as sighed through his debate with George W. Bush in 2000, or Marco Rubio’s New Hampshire malfunction at the hands of Chris Christie.
That brings us to Trump’s Monday night and a performance that could be very charitably described as uneven. What was the worst moment, I wonder, the one that we’ll all be talking about in a week?
Was it when he directly attacked Clinton’s looks before that ugly pivot to her “stamina” at the end? His “birther” answer and shots at Sid Blumenthal, a person most Americans have never heard of? Or how about his persistent interruptions of the first female major party nominee, a tactic unlikely to endear him to Main Line mothers?
I think my favorite was when he said Clinton had been fighting ISIS her entire adult life. Usually, I think I understand what Trump is trying to get at, trying to communicate. That one, however, left me totally stumped. Please feel free to leave your suggestions on how that should be interpreted in the comments.
Clinton’s performance was less-than-stellar, which may be just a meaner way of saying it was good as we ever could have expected. She has this tendency to look very self-satisfied after delivering a zinger that’s clearly been crafted by someone else in Brooklyn and then tested on voters in a fish tank. It’s grating.
But Clinton looked presidential, in command of the facts, in command of the room. Trump sensed that he’d lost the initiative early, and lashed out. He looked cornered, his eyes at times flurrying around the room as if he were facing off multiple enemies at once. Newt Gingrich has a similar tick when he feels he’s losing; at his worst, in moments like these, Trump comes off like Newt without the intellect, which is a scary thing indeed.
So two scenarios, moving forward. The first is that Trump is finished. He got smoked on Monday night, coming across as too ignorant, narrow-minded and, most importantly, erratic. (Here’s a word you’ll be hearing a lot the next few days or weeks: temperament, as in the one Trump doesn’t have to be president.)
Clinton clearly hoped to have Trump lose his cool, she succeeded, and maybe – to make a reference her team will get – this is the moment when President Bartlett sent his Bush-esque opponent packing.
Scenario two begins with the observation that Trump had a tendency to, by many accounts, lose debates during the primaries, yet always kept his lead. “Maybe this really is the start of a decline that will be as quick and remarkable as his rise to the top of the polls,” some idiot wrote at The Daily Beast after Trump’s performance at the Reagan Library debate in September 2015. (Full disclosure: that idiot was me.)
Yes, yes, this isn’t the primaries anymore, but there should always be a hesitancy to proclaim that Trump has been vanquished. In fact, there have been so many “Trump is finally finished” pieces written since the late 1980s that it might qualify as some kind of journalistic subgenre.
But he’s still there, still standing, still quite close to the presidency. So maybe this does not lead to some collapse. And if doesn’t, well, there are two more of these presidential debates to go. Some will remember that Mitt Romney was widely seen as the winner of his first presidential debate with President Obama in 2012, an outcome that led to some genuinely entertaining liberal pundit freak-outs.
My bet is that Trump manages to survive this. He’ll take a hit in the polls, perhaps a bad one. But this doesn’t quite feel like the moment that finishes him off completely, if only because Clinton’s flaws are still there in abundance, and the more fire Trump takes, the more weirdly sympathetic he can look.
Plus, just to repeat myself: there are two more debates left, in addition to a Mike Pence vs. Tim Kaine fight. In a presidential year, October can be very long month.
Would could not predict the MSM would pronounce Cankles the winner, as long as the pig did not fall over?
Like clockwork and on cue.
I think that Trump did what he needed to do. He got just enough shots in that PIAPS still looks slimy but more impotently, he didn’t say anything that is just egregiously wrong or laughable.
That’s sort of the minimum he needed to do, he could have easily done more but it is easy to be an armchair quarterback.
I can barely imagine how difficult it would be to debate someone that has no respect for the facts of an issue, for truth? How she can speak without saying anything meaningful. How a supposedly impartial moderator who in reality is of the same mindset, that sets up a misrepresentation as fact when asking questions.
A corruption most foul.
Trump did fine except for that thing about respecting the outcome of the election.
What comes next? An avalanche of polls showing a Hillary bounce
Headline of the Day Poll
Who won the debate?
Donald Trump (51%)
Hillary Clinton (49%)
Vote
Read more: http://www.headlineoftheday.com/#ixzz4LQv4lBdy
The CBS new York poll also has trump up.
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2016/09/26/cbsnewyork-poll-who-won-the-first-presidential-debate/
I was only able to hear a small portion of the debate because I was attending a friend’s wedding, but it seemed that Shrillary’s delivery was very polished. Too polished. It reminded me of keeping one’s hair perfect with #4 hold strength hair spray. She managed to weasel out of actually answering the questions that I heard asked of her.
Dow futures leaped 120 pts during the debate, indicating the markets clearly think Hillary won
HilLIARy won only in the sense that she didn’t keel right over and fall in a heap on the floor. Apparently she got a super-sized injection of her ZAJ (Zombie animation juice)
That was certainly NOT the way I recall Trump's response to that impertinent, snarky question from the immoderator! Trump almost immediately, in his first second recast the question to be about her stamina and NOT at all about her looks! Holt tried to repeat his snarky question about it only being about "looks" and Trump was having none of it.
Why would the markets go up if she won?
We, or I, had hoped for better from him but it appears what he did has not hurt him, praise God. I think it is more that folks don’t care what they say about him. It’s him or Hillary and NOBODY wants her.
Full debate
https://youtu.be/855Am6ovK7s
Ah, the cucked press shilling for Hillary. What a shocker.
Trump won, the media lost, Clinton is still Clinton.
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