Spectacle of a TV campaign
MONDAY night’s confrontation between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was a spectacle, for sure: the sheer reality-TV hugeness of it, the Super Bowl audience of tens of millions. There was a fundamental asymmetry to the exercise, because of the awful truth that one of the participants had nothing truthful to offer.
Standing at the lectern, interrupting and shouting, playing the invisible accordion with his open hands, filibustering, tossing his word salads — jobs and terrorism and China and everything is terrible — Trump said a lot. But as the debate wore on, he struggled to contend with an opponent who was much more poised and prepared than any of the Republicans he had faced in the primaries.
Ninety minutes was never going to be enough time for Trump to redeem his candidacy, even if by some miracle he had wanted to, if he had suddenly developed a coherent set of policies and principles, an agenda against which Clinton’s proposals could be weighed and reviewed, and a baseline level of decency.
The moderator, Lester Holt of NBC News, meekly retreated into silence as Trump went on the attack, blaming Clinton for Islamic State and joblessness and globalisation, depicting the country as a living hell for black Americans, a land beset by illegal immigrants and gangs with guns, with police officers afraid to stop them.
“It’s all sound bites,” he said at one point, meaning to disparage Clinton, but unwittingly describing the emptiness of his own words.
Depending on how your lenses are polarised, Trump met or exceeded or failed to meet expectations, which were low to begin with. He has lied compulsively since he entered the race, and he was caught again on Monday night with his pants on fire. But anything short of dropping his pants would still have left him with the support of a large portion of the US electorate.
Clinton also met or exceeded or failed to meet expectations, which were different for her.
She had to have just enough levity, mixed with substance, to be stern but not shrill, funny but not flippant, smart but not pedantic, able to stand up to bullying.
On balance, she pulled it off, swatting Trump’s attacks aside and delivering her own criticisms from higher, firmer ground.
It’s absurd that the fate of the race, and the future of the nation, might carom this way or that based on a 90-minute television ritual so tainted by falsehoods. New York, September 27 2016