CLINTON SHINES IN DEBATE

Re: “Debatable judgement”, (PostBag, Oct 1).

You don’t need a poll to decide who won the first presidential debate. All you need is the ability to detect evasion, waffle and diversionary tactics. After the first twenty minutes or so Mr Trump started to lose his grasp. Where Ms Clinton gave calm and measured responses, Mr Trump became rattled and was reduced to desperately interrupting (frequently), often using those interruptions to go off at a tangent without saying anything about policy. He also evaded questions put to him by the moderator, contenting himself with attacking Ms Clinton’s record or policies without offering any cogently argued case for his own “better” solutions. He was very good at saying what was wrong with America’s economy, but not so good at saying precisely what he would do to put it right. Near the end of the debate Mr Trump was flailing about like someone trying to stay afloat when he’s out of his depth.

Far more surprising than the CNN/ ORC poll that “Bangkok Cowboy” derides were the polls that showed Mr Trump as the winner of the debate. I can only assume that poll respondents based their judgements on the number of interruptions made by each candidate, in which case Mr Trump was clearly the winner.

Mr Trump’s post-debate complaints that the moderator gave him a harder time than he gave Ms Clinton (only because Mr Trump was so evasive), and that his microphone was defective (I could hear him clearly enough) show him to be a poor loser. He clearly thought he’d lost otherwise he wouldn’t have made those complaints. Not just a poor loser, but a man with a poor grasp of tactics since he just creates more ammunition for his opponents to throw back at him. Andrew Stewart

Pattaya