OPINION:
All that trouble, all that anticipation of “the debate of the century,” and all that anti-climax. Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton moved the needle so much as a millimeter. Hillary stood on her feet for 90 minutes, with neither a cough nor a faint, looking as buff as Mrs. Santa Claus on Christmas Eve in a pantsuit of fire-engine red, and the Donald, so over-coached that he never smiled nor delivered one of the memorable one-liners everyone expected, survived with neither gaffe nor insult to fight another day.
Like a poor poker player, as one online spectator put it, Hillary has shown her cards, revealing her strategy and now the Donald can play his aces. All the debate-team coaches gave the decision to Hillary, but only on points and without a TKO, forgetting that a presidential “debate” makes its own rules. It’s a game of expectations, and not all of them are great.
The Donald’s aces still to play are Benghazi, the email server, the Clinton Foundation’s pay-for-play scheme, Hillary’s unprecedented selling of access to a president as if she were still peddling a night in the Lincoln Bedroom, her contempt of the voters in her “basket of deplorables,” and her determination never to have a press conference to take unrehearsed questions, even from the likes of Lester Holt. Those are the cards the Donald holds for the second and third debates.
There were a lot of sparks and smoke in the first debate, but not enough flames to scorch anyone. No one but Lester and perhaps Candy Crowley of CNN would have invited someone who barely escaped the pokey, for playing fast and loose with the nation’s most valuable secrets, to declaim without challenge about cybersecurity. The Donald let the opportunity pass without the haymaker questions. Lester peppered the Republican nominee with a barrage of questions about the birther controversy, his lack of gallantry toward women (even Rosie O’Donnell, as the Donald reminded us in an aside), and his politically incorrect views about rioters in Charlotte. Lester never got around to asking Hillary about her Midas-like reputation for corruption both moral and economic. The Clinton campaign spent a week working to intimidate Lester into submission, and succeeded.
The candidates traded small-arms fire over the woeful state of the economy, jobs and race, but it’s the defense of “the homeland” that most Americans are most concerned about. The scene of the debate, Hofstra University on Long Island, lies only nine days and 30 miles removed from the latest radical Islamic terrorist attack in Manhattan, and Mr. Trump made his most telling points in reminding Mrs. Clinton that it was she, as secretary of State, who shared responsibility with Barack Obama for enabling ISIS and its converts to become a global threat to almost everybody.
Answering a question, she went to her talking points, as if they lurked on an unseen index card, to prescribe “an intelligence surge” and an intensification of airstrikes, much like the airstrikes that her mentor calls “barbarism” when the Russians do it. Only those who have never seen war up close imagine that an airstrike is the silver bullet. Mrs. Clinton boasted of her role in the president’s nuclear deal with Iran, which postpones but does not prevent Iran’s Islamic bomb. “That’s diplomacy,” she said proudly.
“People sleep peacefully in their beds at night,” as Winston Churchill said, “only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” Donald Trump is the designated rough man in this race, regarded by the media elites and the other Democrats as hardly housebroken, at risk for breaking the furniture, and not fit for their polite company. “It may not matter,” writes Ron Fornier of Atlantic magazine, a sometime apologist for the Clintons since he shared Arkansas years with them. “Trump is the candidate of change and disruption at a time when voters crave the freshly shaken. The former secretary of State made the strongest case possible for the status quo …” The rough man may speak yet.
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