[ Posted Tuesday, September 27th, 2016 – 15:51 UTC ]
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.
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[ Posted Monday, September 26th, 2016 – 22:27 UTC ]
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.
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[ Posted Thursday, September 22nd, 2016 – 17:11 UTC ]
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.
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[ Posted Wednesday, September 21st, 2016 – 16:32 UTC ]
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.
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[ Posted Tuesday, September 20th, 2016 – 17:03 UTC ]
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.
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[ Posted Monday, September 19th, 2016 – 18:06 UTC ]
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 [...]
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[ Posted Friday, September 16th, 2016 – 15:42 UTC ]
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.
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[ Posted Thursday, September 15th, 2016 – 15:08 UTC ]
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.
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[ Posted Wednesday, September 14th, 2016 – 16:18 UTC ]
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.
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[ Posted Tuesday, September 13th, 2016 – 17:06 UTC ]
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.
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