Last Night's Debate

After watching last night’s presidential debate, I am somewhat confused. The immediate response from the pundits even on Fox News was that Donald Trump lost the debate. I agreed. Yet, this morning the Folks seem to think that he won it.

In the days leading up to the event, I had bought into the idea that he should abandoned the take no prisoners approach and merely appear to be as “presidential” as Hillary Clinton. While he certainly showed he stand there and go toe to toe with the more experienced politician and debater, I winced at his constant interruptions and felt it would hurt him in the eyes of undecided voters.

Certainly, he was on the defense a lot last night, partially due to moderator Lester Holt and partly due to Hillary’s accusations, which he felt the need to defend and rebut. He also landed some good blows himself though, as everybody points out, he missed numerous opportunities to land more. While he hit her hard on the emails after she acknowledged her “error”, he could have used the question about cyber security to hit her even more. And not a word was spoken about the corrupt practices of the Clinton Foundation. Trump also pointedly let pass his potential comeback when he was called a sexist in not raising Hillary’s past actions when all the Bill Clinton sex scandals were coming out. he should have hit her on that.

Trump has this maddening habit of repeating his main points two or three times. It’s bad enough in a speech, but in a debate where his time is limited, it was a crucial mistake.

As for Hillary, she was clearly prepared though most of what she said about her own policies and beliefs were empty rhetoric. How many times did she use the word “invest”? That merely means tax and spend, Dear Reader. She even had the gall to say she would have a special prosecutor on trade!

How about a special prosecutor on her?

And for her to go after Trump on his comments about certain women were hypocritical to say the least. How about her comments about vast right-wing conspiracies in the face of the Lewinsky scandal? How about her surrogates who talked about “trailer park trash” referring to the women who claimed to have had affairs -or sexually assaulted by Bill? Hillary sent her goons out to trash those women. Some of you younger readers may not know about all these things that happened during the Clinton presidency. It behooves you to check them out before November 8.

And Lester Holt. There was so much speculation about how fairly he would handle the debate. He utterly failed. Not only did he throw all the hardball questions at Trump, he reserved his “fact checks” and corrections for Trump. Meanwhile, Hillary got a pass when she denied she had referred to the Trans Pacific trade deal as “the Gold Standard” (She did).

Maybe in the end it doesn’t matter who “won” the debate. I don’t think anybody is going to change their minds based on what happened last night. Keep in mind, the pundits were pretty much unanimous that Obama lost his first debate with Mitt Romney and lost soundly. It didn’t matter in the end.

What I hope to see in the next two debates is Hillary being put on the defensive as to her ethics, scandals, and demonstrated lack of honesty. Then again, it may not matter.