The Republican contender is vulgar, brash, opinionated and unafraid of exposing those attributes to the public gaze, hence all the ‘gotcha’ questions he fielded during the first debate. His opponent, by contrast, was asked to explain nothing about Benghazi, deleted emails, a predatory husband….
Trump is a never-ending story. Who in their right mind would ever tune in to see and hear Hillary? Trump on the other hand is interesting. That is one reason why I think he will win. But being interesting has its drawbacks. You have to talk as do ordinary people. And sometimes ordinary people say things they shouldn’t. Those of you who have ever been drunk know too well what I mean. But even short of inebriation we all fall foul of high standards of civility at times.
Take this erstwhile fat Latino chick (oops! Sorry), Miss Universe 1996, Alicia Machado from Venezuela, who is attacking Trump allegedly because he made certain derogatory remarks about her weight twenty years’ ago. I have no idea whether, in fact, he referred to her as Miss Piggy as she claims and, if he did, to whom and how loudly. He may not have said this at all. The lady in question seems to have had a chequered past and might be making it up. But would you be irritated if you were running a beauty pageant and the winner with a calendar of subsequent appearances to fulfil proceeded to get fat?
OK, if you are a man, you might be struggling with the sheer sexism of considering a woman’s weight. And, moreover, you know what dangerous territory it is. So, switch topic and subject. Suppose you are a flamboyant boxing promoter who sets up a tournament to find the next new contender. A winner emerges and the schedule of fights towards the big pay-off is set in motion. Subsequently your prize-fighter spends most days not in the gym but on his couch eating chips and drinking beer. Oh dear, you might say, you are being a naughty boy.
Steve Kates wrote an excellent piece on the great debate and I don’t want to go over his ground. I don’t know who won. I don’t even know how to tell who won. We all see what we want to see.
There are some people apparently who are undecided and can be persuaded to shift one way or the other at the drop of a hat. A drop of a hat might be Trump sniffing or Hillary shimmying while grinning. I found both annoying. However, while Trump was clearly unconscious of the effect he was having on his microphone during the early part of the debate, Hillary’s display looked as though it had been choreographed beforehand. Let me admit to being hopelessly biased and finding Hillary’s grinning demeanour insufferable rather than merely annoying.
One thing stood out. Under the guidance of the moderator, NBC News anchor Lester Holt, the debate was largely a staged event to shield Hillary and get Trump. When Holt brought up the so-called birther issue and premised a question with his own debatable fact that Trump had changed his mind about the Iraq war, they were illustrative of two things. First, this was largely to be a policy free zone; and, second, omission of inconvenient subject matter being a well-practiced technique of the left, it was to be a Hillary-scandal free zone. There was to be no Holt-initiated talk of Benghazi, or of Libya, or of the Russian reset, or of emails, or of the Clinton Foundation, or of what she said to Wall Street bankers, or of dodging imaginary bullets in Bosnia.
