If the essence of success in business is to identify an opportunity and be the first to do something with it, it was impossible to understand Monday night how Donald Trump became a billionaire. He spent 90 minutes squandering opportunities to put the case against Hillary Clinton to a vast audience.
As the excruciating debate went on (and on and on) it was no secret why Trump failed to dangle some telling facts about Clinton’s records before the receptive audience. You knew he was clueless when Clinton early on pronounced with a straight face that she will appoint a special prosecutor to enforce trade agreements.
A Clinton special prosecutor. We know what that looks like. Law enforcement chasing evidence that appears and disappears without credible explanations, accompanied by vague memories of loyalists who seek to lead the nation. Trump let pass what could have been a devastating retort.
Trump’s erratic performance continued throughout the long night of narcissism. Private conversations with Fox News talker Sean Hannity are not the basis of sound foreign policy. Rambling on about those talks is unnerving when serious challenges confront us and effective answers are available — if you take a little time to study and adopt them.
Trump complained after the debate — nothing unusual about that — that his microphone was not working right. He was wrong. Unfortunately it was on. The world got to watch the loathsome demagogue come undone as the minutes passed.
Nothing that moderator Lester Holt served Trump was a surprise. A few thorough mock debate sessions would have helped the real estate developer and steak salesman become mildly fluent with coherent answers to questions about, oh say, the Libyan disaster, deteriorating relations with Russia, and deadly chaos in the Middle East.
One of Trump’s obvious defects in a debate is that he is not conversant in the basic language of politics and policy. He has the rickety grasp of events and their consequences of someone who never gets past headlines. He is often wrong but never in doubt.
Clinton’s record is so riddled with about-faces, deceptions and lies that a few days of concentration would have allowed Trump to parry her thrusts in a trice Monday night and then set out what he believes in the tone of a person who could be elected to the most powerful office on earth. Given what he seems to believe, maybe it’s for the best that he did not don the mask of knowledge and mislead the American people into believing he possesses beliefs in anything other than his own greatness.
Watching a debate between candidates you are not going to vote for was a liberating experience. Trump’s failures did not make this voter dislike Clinton any less than I did at the beginning of the evening.
She’s still one of the nation’s pre-eminent phonies. Complaining about the rich after years of bilking the nation’s college students out of millions of dollars to hear a plate full of platitudes. Ever calculating, she turned her back on trade agreements that have helped the American economy grow into the resilient powerhouse it remains.
Clinton is like a dour Cole Porter in these settings. List after list after list are her dreary lyrics in a tuneless song. Programs galore that will hike the size of our behemoth government and add to the working families’ cost of funding it. Trump was incapable of making the case against those policies to an audience yearning for change.
Clinton got a pass on having to provide details on her astounding recklessness in handling government documents. Her pathological addiction to secrecy went unexamined because Trump dare not tread on the turf of transparency.
The gods must be very angry with us. They rebuke us with two candidates sentient people disdain and then they punish us by having them debate three times in four weeks. Each will be worse than the one before, you can be certain of that.
The second presidential debate is scheduled for October 9 in St. Louis. It’s a town meeting format. Clinton will tell us why the nation should settle for more of the same. Trump will be at a disadvantage again because his microphone will be on.
