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Our subtitle today is not original, so we've got to start by giving credit where credit is due. David French, a writer for the ultraconservative National Review (and a man once so horrified by Donald Trump's candidacy that he considered running himself), had the funniest metaphor for Trump's performance in Monday's first presidential debate:
There has been relatively little speculation this election year about what could possibly be the "October surprise." In a normal presidential election year, this is a fun subject to speculate about when the actual news from the campaign trail gets dull and repetitive. This year, of course, that hasn't exactly happened -- the political news has been anything but dull and repetitive, in fact. Because of this, most political reporters haven't even bothered to wonder if an October surprise will happen, much less what it might consist of. The few articles I've seen have suggested two possibilities: Wikileaks releasing more of Hillary Clinton's emails, and Vladimir Putin launching some military adventurism somewhere in the world. Both, it's interesting to note, would aid Donald Trump's candidacy. Perhaps one or the other of these will happen, but I think there's a different October surprise out there, and one which (depending on the outcome) might help Clinton, not Trump.
As startling as it is to those of us who obsess over politics, last night's presidential debate was actually the first time millions of Americans paid any attention whatsoever to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. For millions, the first debate is the first time they tune in at all, both literally and figuratively. Even more astonishing, most of them haven't made up their minds on which candidate to support, even this late in the race.
Well, the first presidential debate is a done deal, and as always I like to quickly type out my own personal reactions before reading everyone else's, to give you an opinion uninfluenced by the herd mentality of the rest of the media.
Are the presidential debates a valuable tool for voters to become informed about the candidates, or have they morphed into something which has no real bearing on how anyone would perform the job of president? That was the provocative subject of a Washington Post opinion piece today, and the author mostly came down on the side of the debates having outlived their usefulness.
As I write that headline, I have to wonder why we all haven't been using the neologistic verb "Donald ducking" by this point in the presidential race. After all, a large part of Donald Trump's campaign has been built on the foundation of him ducking questions and issues that he doesn't want to talk about. He's a master at the art, in fact. Consider just the birther issue -- up until last Friday, Trump's been successfully ducking the issue for the entire campaign. He never answered the basic question of Barack Obama's birthplace, saying quite bluntly that he just didn't want to talk about it. He got away with not talking about it for almost a year and a half. Donald ducked, and it worked.
Lester Holt has his work cut out for him, that's for sure. Holt, news anchor for NBC, will be the moderator for the first presidential debate. It will quite likely be the most-watched television debate in American history. It will also probably generate a few moments that historians will later endlessly replay when trying to explain the 2016 election. In other words, there will be soundbites.
Hillary Clinton's lead in the race for Electoral College votes is shrinking. In fact, it has been shrinking for a solid month now. Two weeks ago (the last time I wrote one of these columns), this hadn't really benefited Donald Trump much. Now, however, Trump seems to be surging in the polls [...]
The media got played by Donald Trump this morning, once again. Picture Charlie Brown lying flat on his back, wondering why he keeps falling for the old kick-the-football bit. That was cable television, after they had carried -- live -- a full hour of an empty podium (Trump didn't start on time), then a full-on advertisement for Trump's new D.C. hotel, then some surrogates saying how wonderful Trump was. At the very end, Trump uttered the 30 seconds of soundbite the cable channels had been waiting for, and then even though it was billed as a press conference, Trump walked off and refused to answer any questions.
Up until the past week, there was one aspect of the 2016 presidential race that most had completely overlooked. Barring any third-party surprises, America is about to elect either the oldest or the second-oldest first-term president ever. Furthermore, if Bernie Sanders had edged Hillary Clinton out for the Democratic nomination, we would have been guaranteed to elect the oldest first-term president in our entire history.