THE BAD BOY IS NO PRESIDENT
But it doesn’t matter that Clinton the honor student crushed Trump the class slacker. Debates are personality contests, not the SATs.
There is a familiar character in movies aimed at teenagers. She’s a girl — it’s usually a girl — who comes to school well-scrubbed and with all her homework done and all of her pencils sharpened. She’s in a well-pressed dress and when she is called on by the teacher, her responses are crisp and well-rehearsed. But she’s also a goody-two-shoes, smugly selfsatisfied and not a really cool kid. Way in the back of the room slouched at his desk is the class bad boy in his black leather jacket who makes faces, rolls spitballs, and amuses the kids around him with his wisecracks at the expense of the model student. He’s also something of a bully.
So it was at Monday night’s presidential debate with Donald Trump, the sullen rebel, picking at the well-pressed pinafore of model student Hillary Clinton.
Like the high-school slacker, Trump was unprepared. Much of what he had to say consisted of tired platitudes about the headlong plunge of America into Third-World mediocrity, foreign countries eating our lunch, parasitic allies leeching off of us. Much of it was recycled from the Republican presidential debates from this spring.
Clinton, by contrast, proved once again that she’s the smartest kid in the class but probably not the most likable.
In the debate, the honor roll student beat the pants off the class wiseguy, and the senior class yearbook will reflect that. But she probably didn’t win the support of the kids who prefer cheeky iconoclasm to scrupulous preparation and polished presentation.
For alienated, discontented Americans — the 60-year-old software engineer ticked off about having been pushed aside by a technology-savvy H-1B visa holder, or a factory worker sidelined by low-priced labor from Mexico — Clinton had little to offer.
Trump, as he had done so effectively in the primaries, channeled the frustrations such people endure by expressing them in an idiom that is neither elegant nor refined nor even wellinformed. But he sounds a lot like they’d sound if given the opportunity to stand on a national stage.
Trump’s insolence and self-aggrandizing puffery, his pouting and posturing, are a small price to pay for the satisfaction of having someone who “tells it like it is.”
Clinton will probably get a modest bump in the polls for her solid and well-informed performance, but the debate was a personality test more than it was an SAT. She needed to descend from the loftiness of the honor society and mix more freely with the kids in the lunch room. She missed an opportunity to do that. She still has two debates to make her case, but she’ll never win over the kids in the detention hall, and she probably would be wasting her time trying.
The polls will continue to be close, and waiting around for a knockout blow to be delivered will not be a good use of our time. The messages of the candidates will be largely unchanged from now until Nov. 8 and for all of their value as political spectacles, the presidential debates of 2016 will be no more decisive in the outcome than any of the others we’ve had since 1960.
Polarization has so cemented in place the political loyalties of Americans that even those Republicans who rejected Trump this spring have concluded that they have discovered the appeal of the kid who never turns in his homework on time.
She probably didn’t win the support of the kids who prefer iconoclasm to preparation