5
takeaways from the first presidential debate
Clinton
hits him where it hurts, and Trump’s boorish reaction hands her a
win.
By GLENN THRUSH
9/27/16, 7:53 AM CET
There were a couple
of not-so-very-subtle signals here inside of Hofstra University that
Donald Trump lost Monday night’s highly-anticipated debate against
Hillary Clinton, and badly.
The first was the
audible sound of groaning by some of his supporters (picked up by my
attentive colleague Steve Shepard) inside the debate hall as Trump
meandered self-defensively through a succession of answers meant to
defend himself against a very focused, very energized and very
well-rehearsed Hillary Clinton.
Another tell that
the night was a dud: After the 90-minute sparring match finished,
Clinton’s team practically bounded into the spin room — more in
glassy-eyed disbelief than visible elation that things had gone so
much better than expected. The Republican nominee’s people, by
contrast, dribbled into the media pen like surly seventh-graders
headed for homeroom the day before summer vacation. “F—k, let’s
do this,” a prominent Trump surrogate said before diving into a
scrum.
Trump and his
new-ish messaging team have labored mightily to turn the avatar of
populist rage into a reasonable facsimile of someone you could see
sitting in the Oval Office. But this best-laid plan unraveled on
Monday — amid Clinton’s steely assault and the dignified
interrogation of NBC’s Lester Holt, who struck a deft balance
between facilitator, BS detector and lion tamer.
Within minutes,
Clinton’s attacks forced domesticated Donald to go feral — he
bellowed, interrupted her repeatedly, grunted, and toward the
bedraggled end, became muted and pouty.
“It was bizarre,”
said Barack Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe, who seemed
visibly relieved. “He was clearly rattled, and clearly focused on
defending himself, which I’m told narcissists are prone to do, and
he clearly faded at the end. It’s not like she’s going to jump
out to a 10-point lead, but this was good.”
Whether or not this
reverses Trump’s momentum, or re-establishes her dominance is an
open question. Who won is not. Here are five takeaways.
Trump was wimpy on
defense. Trump is supposed to be the big meanie but it was Clinton
who hit him where it hurt most. It doesn’t take a Jung (or even Dr.
Phil after a couple of Bud Lights) to figure out that the Republican
nominee — who boasts like a barfly with a winning Lotto ticket —
just might be over-compensating for something. Hence, Clinton, who
started the debate a little tentatively, quickly launched into a
carefully planned program of Freudian mind games, contrasting her own
middle-class businessman dad (who had his own issues) with Trump’s
imperious, larger-than-life father Fred who launched his son’s
business career but also was said to be extremely tough on him.
First she started in
with a paean to her father’s toil running a small printing business
in Chicago (This might be the first time a candidate has described,
in detail, the silk-screen squeegee process on a debate stage) —
then pivoting to mocking supposedly self-made Trump’s acceptance of
a $14 million loan to start his real estate business. “You know,
Donald was very fortunate in his life and that’s all to his
benefit. He started his business with $14 million, borrowed from his
father,” she said icily.
Trump may have lost
the first debate, but he’s proven to be a fast learner.
“My father gave me
a very small loan in 1975 and I built it into a company that’s
worth many, many billions of dollars,” he responded weakly — and
so it went on a range of topics.
Whether it was
because Clinton was so well prepped, and Trump was so breezily
unprepared — or a simple case of opening night jitters — the
bully-boy nominee abandoned his most effective mode of debate combat,
answering an attack with a harsher one. She went right for Trump’s
ego — questioning his questionable $11 billion net worth, his
boastful record on job creation and picking apart his tough talk on
fighting ISIL.
In 2007, preparing
for a primary race she’d eventually lose, she told me that the key
to presidential political campaigns was understanding that the most
effective attacks weren’t about exploiting someone’s weaknesses
but challenging an opponent’s perceived strengths. When confronted
with that assault, Trump wilted and offered a series of meandering
answers that had his Republicans wincing. “It was a draw,” former
Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown said. “But he was on the
defensive far too much. That’s a direct result of his
inexperience.”
What about the
Clinton Foundation? The former secretary of state’s debate team
(including longtime aide Philippe Reines, who snapped a pre-debate
photo in a Trump circled-finger pose) expected him to savage her on
the various questions raised about her family’s foundation. They
were worried about it. While he hammered her ever-so-briefly on
emails, he was so engaged in self-justification, he flat-out forgot
to pursue an attack that could have made the night a lot less lousy.
His ’30 years’
attack worked — and he’ll use it again. Trump may have lost the
first debate, but he’s proven to be a fast learner, and is likely
to come back stronger in early October for the second debate, a town
hall style affair, in St. Louis. And there were a few gold nuggets
strewn in the wreckage of Hofstra — the most valuable an assault
(demonstrable and fact-checker-friendly) on Clinton’s effectiveness
in 25-plus years of public life.
The
been-there-not-done-that argument was particularly useful when
coupled with his usual slams on Bill Clinton’s passage of the
increasingly unpopular NAFTA agreement from the 1990s and Hillary
Clinton’s election year flip-flop from TPP booster to opponent.
“But in all
fairness to Secretary Clinton, when she started talking about this,
it was really very recently,” Trump said of her opposition to the
trade deal. “She’s been doing this for 30 years. And why hasn’t
she made the agreements better? The NAFTA agreement is defective.
Just because of the tax and many other reasons, but just because of
the fact.”
When Clinton claimed
that she planned to “really work to get new jobs and to get exports
that helped to create more new jobs.” He scoffed, and shot back,
“But you haven’t done it in 30 years or 26 years.”
Clinton effectively
attacked his business career. Trump’s attempt to head off
debate-night questions about his five-year campaign promoting the
birther slander against Barack Obama was a humbling face-plant. His
attempt to pin the origin of the charge against Clinton associate Sid
Blumenthal was semi-effective with the political press, but it
withered under the insistent interrogation of an African-American
moderator determined to extract an apology or reasonable explanation.
Trump offered neither — and suggested Obama should actually be
grateful he pursued the canard because it’s now been resoundingly
put to rest.
Republican
presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee
Hillary
Politically, his
tortured explanation helps energize black voters — who already
oppose him in historic numbers. But later in the debate, Clinton
plucked the strains of what could be a genuine crossover hit this
fall among ever-elusive white working-class voters and independents:
Trump’s failure to turn over his tax returns. Clinton went there
with a vengeance — engaging in a little Trump-esque fact-free
speculation about the motives of the billionaire
developer-turned-reality TV star.
“So you’ve got
to ask yourself, why won’t he release his tax returns?” Clinton
mused, with relish. “And I think there may be a couple of reasons.
First, maybe he’s not as rich as he says he is. Second, maybe he’s
not as charitable as he claims to be. Third, we don’t know all of
his business dealings…. Or maybe he doesn’t want the American
people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he’s paid nothing
in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody’s ever seen
were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state
authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they
showed he didn’t pay any federal income tax.”
Clinton launched a
merciless attack on his habit of stiffing contractors who have
labored on his construction projects over the years.
Trump’s answer did
more harm than good:
“That makes me
smart,” he said, referring to his business, not his political,
acumen.
Her most effective
attack — and his worst answer. If the Republican nominee needed any
more proof that preparation trumps bombast in a general election
debate, he got it when Clinton launched a merciless attack on his
habit of stiffing contractors who have labored on his construction
projects over the years. Again, Clinton brought it back to her
father, describing how bad he would have felt if one of his clients
had accepted his work without paying his bill.
“I’ve met
dishwashers, painters, architects, marble installers, drapery
installers, who you refused to pay when they finished the work you
asked them to do,” Clinton said, delivering a carefully scripted
attack. “We have an architect in the audience who designed one of
your clubhouses at one of your golf courses. It’s a beautiful
facility. It immediately was put to use. And you wouldn’t pay what
the man needed to be paid, what he was charging you to do.”
This is a particular
dangerous issue for a candidate whose entire campaign is rooted in
fighting for the working class — and his flippant response, yet
again, gave even greater comfort to his enemies.
“Maybe he didn’t
do a good job and I was unsatisfied with his work,” Trump quipped.
This story has been
updated to correctly spell the name of Clinton aide Philippe Reines.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário