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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:
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.
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.
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.
There was some rather important economic news yesterday, which could be summed up as "things are getting better." Incomes are rising, unemployment has stayed low, the number of uninsured Americans has now dropped by half (thanks to Obamacare), and all of these things are happening at historic rates. The Great Recession is finally over, in other words.
You could call this whole article an open letter to Lester Holt, I suppose. But it's really directed towards anyone at all in the media, because from what I've seen so far they all are missing the chance to ask Donald Trump a painfully obvious followup question, and instead are following Trump down a rabbit hole of his own making.
Hillary Clinton made a deplorable basket case this weekend. That is, she made the case that "half" of the supporters of Donald Trump belong in a "basket of deplorables." It just sounds funnier to say it the first way, that's all.
Before we begin, we promise we'll get to that rather-provocative subtitle later, as we turn this week's talking points section over to an attempt at providing campaign advice for Team Clinton. We've been long wondering why Hillary hasn't made some sort of effort to put these two large issues behind her on the campaign trail, and our frustration has led us to offering up what she should say in order to achieve this goal.
Donald Trump going to Mexico could have had a certain "Nixon goes to China" flavor about it, and he actually was getting some good reviews for crossing the very low bar of "not totally embarrassing himself or his country" -- at least for the first few hours. Then he went to Phoenix, and Mr. Hyde came back out.