The results of the debate may well have guaranteed a victory for Hillary Clinton.
Not because Donald Trump fell apart or rambled, though he did so at times.
The problem for the Republicans was that Trump was so much better than anyone expected, remembering that the bar had been set low.
That makes it that much harder, and it was already close to impossible, to convince Trump to drop out of the race. It would have been difficult for a replacement candidate, whether it be Mike Pence or someone else, to win and the campaigning would have been a logistical nightmare since it is too late to have Trump's name removed from the ballots, but it offered the Republicans possibly the only chance they had, barring an October surprise, to defeat Hillary Clinton.
Consider that the latest WikiLeaks release showed she maintains public positions that are different from her private positions. She still has not explained her missing e-mails. Sure, she's sorry she used a private e-mail account, but why did she feel the need to destroy the e-mails? It is easy to make the case of people gaining access to the secretary of state by contributing to the Clinton Foundation. You can make a good case against Clinton for her treatment of some of the women who have made accusations against Bill Clinton.
Bobby Jindal would have taken that information and crushed her with it and he never made any inroads at all in the Republican race.. In fact, Ben Carson is probably the only one, other than Donald Trump, who would not have bludgeoned Clinton to a massive defeat with those kind of weaknesses hanging over her head.
But just like Claire McCaskill, who wound up facing Todd Akin, the perfect opponent, in her re-election campaign four years ago, Hillary wound up with a gift- courtesy of the GOP and the media- maybe the only candidate she could defeat in a year in which everyone is wanting change.
For every one of Clinton's flaws, which might have been fatal to her election chances in any other year, Donald Trump has a worse flaw. Bill Clinton mistreated women, no doubt about it, but judging from everything he has said during the campaign, the Access Hollywood video and the Howard Stern tapes, Trump is definitely not the person who should make the case.
The Clinton Foundation is a problem, but Trump is not the one to prosecute the case since his foundation is a train wreck.
The e-mails probably should have been enough to keep her from becoming president, but Trump keeps creating so many problems for himself with his lack of self-control and his apparent lack of decency that he has never been able to damage her with them. The people who were already ready to vote against Clinton because of the e-mails will vote against her. Trump has not done anything to bring more people under his tent.
That being said, Trump showed slightly more discipline tonight than he did in the first debate, not enough to beat her, but enough to offer false hope to those who keep believing, despite all contrary evidence, that Trump has finally turned the corner.
A few other thoughts about tonight's debate:
-Libertarian Gary Johnson knows more about Aleppo than Donald Trump. Martha Raddatz sliced up Trump on her questions about Syria and Trump didn't know enough about the subject to know he had been wounded..
-Trump landed some strong blows with his mentions of the Clinton e-mails and hit some of the notes that the right wing of the Republican party wanted to hear, but he had some cringeworthy moments.
For instance, his putdown of Mike Pence. It was petty, especially considering the contortions Pence went through during the vice presidential debate to support Trump. I am not a fan of Pence, but he certainly deserved better than Trump and his hurt feelings offered him.
-Speaking of cringeworthy- how insensitive was it for Trump to say that a dead American soldier would still be alive if he were president?
-The most dangerous moment for Trump came when he proclaimed that he had never assaulted a woman in the manner he described during the Access Hollywood video. All the news media or the Democrats, or both, have to do is to find one person who can turn that statement into a lie. Perhaps Trump was just lying to impress Billy Bush of Access Hollywood, or we could be seeing the same kind of avalanche of accusers who came forward after Bill Cosby denied any wrongdoing.
-Clinton's strongest points came when she emphasized the children's health insurance program and after 9-11, times when she worked across the aisle with Republicans for the greater good. It was easier to imagine Clinton doing that than to envision Trump working with Democrats.
-Clinton's mention of Muhammad Ali was particularly fitting since her strategy seemed to mirror that of Ali when he fought George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. Clinton did Ali's rope-a-dope, allowing Trump to punch himself out. She didn't achieve the same result as Ali's knockout, but then that might have driven Trump out of the race.
And for the Democratic Party, Donald Trump continues to be the gift that keeps on giving.
(Photo by Stephen Crowley)
10 comments:
The picture makes it look as if they're singing a duet. What might that song be?
Trump and Clinton are a gift to each other. Each would be in trouble against an opponent who made any kind of sense. Speaking of opponents, thanks for mentioning the Libertarians.
Trump threatened Clinton with imprisonment should he be elected. That is something I would have expected from Hitler, Stalin or Franco, and maybe I should not be surprised that Trump intends to turn this country into a Dictatorship.
Or perhaps returning the country to the Rule of Law?
We're already headed for "Dictatorship" or more likely a tyranny of an oligarchy when leadership criminals like Hillary are considered to be untouchable by the authorities, and Trump's one liner didn't imply anything about directly throwing her into jail. Really, all he has to do is to replace the political appointees in the Department of Justice, and use all the evidence already gathered and run it through the judicial system. Her own words have already sufficiently convicted her, they just haven't been presented in a court of law.
Turn it around: the very first big Clinton Administration scandal which was also the first of Hillary's was the firing of the travel office and the political prosecution of its leader, Billy Dale, who was acquitted by his jury in 2 hours. Which, except for the verdict, was straight out of Stalin's playbook, but for some inexplicable reason prior to the verdict that wasn't viewed as something that was turning "this country into a Dictatorship".
I bring this up because Hillary's clear pattern, going back to her very first big job on the Watergate committee, is of criminal behavior (that plus failing the D.C. Bar Exam forced her exile to Arkansas, something I doubt she's ever gotten over), and it clearly extends all the way to her actions as Secretary of State, e.g. her private email server and its classified information, including the most restricted of NSA materials, and the Clinton Foundation, plus the Clinton Foundation bribes, and we have every reason to believe she'll continue it if she becomes president. After all, she's never really be held to account for any of it, never been indicted.
That's going to create a deplorable situation: for example, why should us low level shlubs follow the law then the top leadership of the country brazenly doesn't? Republics die when the paradigm changes from voluntary compliance with the law to "what you can get away with", and for now, good luck convicting anyone who was loose with classified materials. Nor expect the normal sharing of those by other countries, something eviscerates The Globe's Official Reason for endorsing her.
We also can be very sure the Congress won't hold her to account, and their continued failure to play their checks and balances role also means the end of the Republic. Heck, they aren't even complaining about the usurpation of their unquestioned in the Constitution role of appropriating funds, the latest example being Obama's giving the Iranians a cool 1.8 million in cash, using the Judgement Fund, which is how the linked author expects Obamacare insurers to be bailed out without having first to get the money from the Congress.
Bobby Jindal would have taken that information and crushed her with it and he never made any inroads at all in the Republican race.
Bobby Jindal has no moral courage. see how he treated brutal physical assaults on his staff, and would never have tried to "crush her", which, BTW, we're reliably informed by one of your commentators is beyond the pale rhetoric.
The Clinton Foundation is a problem, but Trump is not the one to prosecute the case since his foundation is a train wreck.
You think he or the rest of the nation that matters in this election, those who might vote for him, care? That "train wreck" is the result of naked, boastful partisan action, and can't be compared to the high treason of selling out the nation to foreigners. When Trump makes that case, has "the New York Attorney General said your foundation's paperwork wasn't in order" been a devastating comeback?
The most dangerous moment for Trump came when he proclaimed that he had never assaulted a woman in the manner you claim he described during the Access Hollywood video.
Fixed it for you.
Clinton's strongest points came when she emphasized the children's health insurance program and after 9-11, times when she worked across the aisle with Republicans for the greater good.
You mean like when she voted to invade Iraq?
I don't think, after she played her very significant role into turning the Middle East into an abattoir ("We came, we saw, he died"), that anyone doubts her status as a warmonger. Just how this is supposed to help her as we move towards a shooting war with Russia, the only nation that can destroy the US in 30 minutes, is supposed to help her ... perhaps you can explain that?
It again goes to my points about her total negatives on the basis of The Globe's endorsement, and going further, how pretty much everything she has every put her hand to turned into a debacle, starting with that attempt to deny Nixon the benefit of counsel during his Senate trial after he was impeached, which aborted her D.C. political career and forced her to accept Bill's outstanding offer of marriage and exile herself to mid-70s Arkansas.
And let me address your overall thesis: Yes, Trump is the establishment Republican Party's nightmare, and that's not a bug, it's a feature. Or as @EmpireOfJeff tweeted from a now purged account:
“You “conservative” “pundits” still don’t get it: Trump isn’t our candidate. He’s our murder weapon. And the GOP is our victim. We good, now?"
For us, all paths of sanity run through "crushing" the GOP establishment, and it looks like, if you're right, this current mess will significantly further that objective. You can't, for example, trash your more popular head of the ticket and hope to help down ticket candidates, as is now the official policy of the Republican National Committee.
Heck, I'm still not completely sold on voting to return Blunt to the Congress, and if it looks like the GOP establishment of which he's a leading member will succeed in destroying Trump's candidacy by, for example, their going even further in kneecapping the Get Out The Vote (GOTV) effort for him, as is currently claimed by Politico, well, as Nikolay Chernyshevsky said, "the worse the better".
It's a good thing I don't pay for this crap.
My take on Sunday night's must-see TV:
Toronto 7, Texas 6 in 10 innings.
Well done 2:15, that is some Swiftian satire!
What?! 2:15 is not a deluded racist but a clever satirist? The joke's on me, then. "Weaponized buffoon" should have given it away.
Who let Martin out from under his rock? What a windbag. Please, drop the rock back down. Hard.
Clinton can only go to prison if found guilty so get real and quit crying Hitler. Trump is the man Clinton is week and will do nothing but bring us down.
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