I’ll admit up front that I could only watch a few minutes live. Because: blood pressure. After it was over, I checked in on the coverage on the CO page and the Daily Wire, which is probably not the best way to process a debate, because it involves having your reactions mediated through the initial reactions of others.
But over the last 24 hours I’ve watched nearly all of it, in smaller doses. I say “nearly” because: blood pressure, still.
But honestly, I’m so disgusted by Kamala and her MSM enablers – and so worried that the election is even close, and fearful of the horrible consequences should she win – that I couldn’t stand to watch more than the first few minutes live.
If you’re a close reader, you will perceive my immediate post-debate frame of mind from the adjectives in the last sentence: disgusted, worried, fearful. I won’t be in that mode for long – I’m a toxic Midwestern male who was raised right, so I don’t do “fearful” and “worried” as a default setting – but this felt like an opportunity missed.
So I spent the actual debate hours as follows: I prayed for the country for a few minutes, then threw myself back into an “organizing my home office” project that I’ve been working on, and then watched the first half of the Lions/Rams Sunday night football game that I had DVR’ed.
I also spent part of the next 24 hours doing something that I find therapeutic when I need to burn off frustrated energy: working out. I’m not a fanatical fitness person, but for the last six months I’ve been eating healthier and doing a daily free weights and pushup routine, and I tripled my routine after the debate.
I may be fighting off increasing frustration over the election and our country’s future, but at least I’m starting to get some pecs out of it. So I’ve got that going for me.
Anyway, because my profession hard-wired me to give grades, I thought I’d grade the three debate participants: Que Mala, Trump, and the MSM.
I’ve taken my grading system from Harvey Mansfield, a temperamentally conservative and actually great Harvard professor. A few decades ago, Mansfield acknowledged the ubiquity of grade inflation – over 90% of grades at Harvard were “A”s – by giving his students two grades in his classes.
He recognized that since all other Harvard profs were giving inflated grades, it wouldn’t be fair for him to give the authentic, actual grade that he believed students had earned, thus lowering their GPA. (And likely ensuring that nobody would be taking his classes in the future!)
So he started giving two grades: one inflated grade (which would appear on their transcripts, and was commensurate with other Harvard grades) and one “legitimate” grade, i.e. what he – with his old-fashioned, high standards! – believed the paper had actually earned.
So here are my debate grades:
Kamala – her adusted grade (i.e. reflecting what semi-informed people who get their news from the MSM would give it) is a B. Her legitimate (“Mansfield”) grade is a D-.
She is an annoying liar, and she could no more get a passing grade than speak in an authentic black accent. (“Ah, ah say they-uh, Ya bettuh thank uh union membuh!”) And she repeatedly gave her patented word salad answers to evade questions. Example, from the FIRST MINUTE: “Is the country better off now than it was 4 years ago?” Legitimate answer: either yes or no, and here’s why.
Que Mala’s answer? It began with, “So, I was raised as a middle class kid….” And went on for – I Schiff you not – 330 words!
For comparison, the Gettysburg Address is 275 words.
I’ve read the Gettysburg Address. I’ve taught the Gettysburg Address. And Que Mala’s stream of consciousness rambling about her hardscrabble early years being born to two PhDs and raised on the mean streets of Berkeley and Montreal is no Gettysburg Address!
By the way, that moment was a missed opportunity for Trump. As soon as the moderators came back to him after Kamala’s rambling answer, he could have said a variation of his line with Biden: “I don’t know what she just said, and I’m not sure that she does either. But one thing is clear: she did not come close to answering your question, and we all know why. You’re obviously not better off than you were 4 years ago, and Kamala and Biden are the reason.”
I don’t know how many truly undecided voters are still out there, but if they exist, they had to see how dishonest and evasive Kamala was, and how annoying. But she still gets the inflated B because, with the terrible moderators’ corrupt help, she managed to tone down her existential awfulness for 90 minutes and appear to be just an untalented, mediocre liar, instead of the worst politician of this century.
Trump – his adjusted grade (recognizing that the MSM did everything they could to adjust it downward, as they always do) is a C. His legitimate (“Mansfield”) grade is a B-.
On substance and legitimate points, he won hands down, because he said a lot of true things (compared to Kamala, who said zero true things). But those points were diluted by too frequent distractions.
He made some good points – he’s the first GOP pol I’ve ever seen nail a lefty with a pointed debate question on abortion (“Would you allow abortion at 7 months?”) – and landed some good jabs within sometimes over-long answers.
A strong point was his closing statement, which should have also been his opening statement, and many statements in between: she’s in power now, she’s tied to Biden’s terrible policies, and every promise she’s making now is something she could have done over the last 4 years.
His low points were the lack of message discipline, which even most of his supporters are wary of, IMHO. Kamala threw out every bit of BS that she could to try to rattle him, repeating proven hoaxes (very fine people, J6 was worse than the Holocaust, etc.), and he took the bait way too often. Frustrating!
One face-palm example was her dig at his crowd sizes. Like everything else, this was a lie – Kamala’s crowds are smaller and phony, made up largely of bussed-in astro turf Dem hacks and union members – and Trump’s aren’t. But that’s beside the point: crowd size is an irrelevant metric. (If his crowd sizes vs. Biden’s in 2020 were dispositive, he would have won by 30 points, even accounting for vote rigging and fraud).
So arguing about crowd size is not just a waste of time and a distraction, but it connects with one of Trump’s negatives: his ego. We all know that the national Dems are pathological narcissists with ginormous egos themselves, but Trump wears his on his sleeve, and it does not attract independents that he needs, to say the least.
His smart answer would have been that every time she tried to bait him, he should have given a Trump version of Reagan’s head shake and grin, and, “There you go again.” Which he could follow with a 1-2 sentence specific slap down, before returning to his policy arguments.
Something like, “I know you’d like to divert us with childish distractions, and if I had your horrible record and failed policies – open borders that are hurting Americans all over the country, high crime, high inflation, record debt – I’d want to change the subject, too! But I’m not going to waste Americans’ time on such desperate ploys, while the country is suffering from the Biden-Harris mal-administration.”
You know that Trump’s team had to have been coaching him to not take the bait, and it’s aggravating that after 9 years in politics, he still can’t reliably do it. But that being said, since everyone knows Trump so well by now, I don’t think that that will seriously hurt him. But it’s a missed opportunity in a limited-opportunity environment.
The MSM “moderators” – Inflated grade, F minus. Legitimate grade, F to the infinity of all minuses.
It’s often been said that we don’t hate the media enough. But after Tuesday night, I’m getting there. And may God have mercy on their souls.
David Muir was a dishonest, condescending hack, as was Linsey Davis. (I won’t comment on the well-known advice about how you should never trust someone named “Linsey” with no “d” in her name. But she definitely proved that truism.)
They made CNN look reasonable, which I wouldn’t have believed possible.
They did for Kamala what Kamala did for Willie Brown. And they left that stage with the same amount of dignity as she had when she left his office, straightening out her clothes as if everyone in the outer office didn’t know exactly how her “climb the political ladder” plan was going.
This is not hard, people: YOU CAN’T HAVE PLAYERS FROM THE OTHER TEAM BEING REFS! OH! OHHHHHHHH!
(Sorry about that. My keyboard is now intermittently defaulting to the Sam Kinison filter, and I’m having a hard time controlling it.)
The bogus and constant fact-checking of Trump and gentle head-patting for Kamala was pathetic.
One way to counter that, for our candidates in the future: When the first fact-check comes up, hit them immediately: “There’s no time for me to fully rebut that statement in this real-time debate. But – [Here you give a specific evidential claim] – and I encourage everyone to do their own research on this point, and you’ll see that I’ve got nothing to hide, and I am telling you the truth. My campaign site will have all the evidence, with supporting references, by the time this debate is over. And when you confirm that for yourself, I know that you’ll remember who was lying to you just now, and why.”
In any case, one reliable conservative move for the last several decades (it has worked since at least Nixon) is to attack the bias of the press, and Muir and Davis gave Trump such a target-rich environment. I so wish he would have taken 30 seconds to point that out!
For example, when they had fact checked him for the fifth time – often in distorted ways, and sometimes just flat-out wrongly – he should have started one answer with, “I’m going to answer your question, but I just want to point out that you’ve now fact-checked me (use some air quotes around that phrase) four or five times, and you’ve let Kamala lie way more times than that without doing the same to her. People see what you’re doing, which explains how little you are trusted by the public. Anyway, on to your latest biased question…”
One more note: I admire a lot about Trump, and desperately want him to win, and my analysis here is a little unfair to him, in one sense. I’ve got time to analyze, and can apply “esprit de l’escalier” – the “wit of the staircase,” i.e. good responses/comebacks that you only think of as you’re leaving a party.
Even though Trump had to know that many of Kamala’s false attacks were coming when he got to the party, the extent of the moderators’ wrong-footing him – even compared to past bad examples! – made his job a lot harder than ours is now, after the fact.
I think the Daily Wire post-debate panel got it mostly right: While this was something of a wasted opportunity for Trump, they don’t think this is going to fundamentally change the election. It’s tight, and it’s likely to remain tight, and this debate didn’t change anybody’s mind about Trump (his Trumpiness has been baked into the cake for a long time now), nor about Kamala.
They thought that Trump clearly won the first 25 minutes of the debate and the final statements, but that Harris’ taunting him on crowd sizes started him into a bait-taking mistake, followed by Muir and Davis turning in the sleaziest performance in the history of media whore-dom. (I am paraphrasing slightly.)
I don’t believe that Kamala’s handlers will let her do another debate, even though her side called for that. (Purely as a feint, IMHO, because it momentarily makes them look confident.) She’s an extremely vulnerable candidate, because she’s transparently dishonest and cloying, and also a dullard. The fact that she survived one debate – yes, with the assistance of horrifically corrupt moderators – is the high-water mark of her political career, and she’d have nowhere to go from there but down.
(And okay, feel free to insert a Willie Brown joke here if you must.)
My main hope is that our side highlights the many instances of partisan hackery and lies from the moderators and Kamala, and then moves on to disciplined attacks on her and Walz, and that enough undecided voters see that and take it to heart.
Trump has his flaws, but he’s also got virtues, and you can’t say the same about Kamala. She is a poisonous and inauthentic grifter, and we need to spend every minute and dollar between now and November bringing that before the voters!
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 