If Donald Trump were not an incorrigible, probably irredeemable ass, he would be well on the way to the presidency after last night’s debate with Hillary Clinton.
All he needed to do was to appear a calm, rational, safe choice, sufficient to gull enough undecided voters who have already half-forgotten everything he has said and done as a candidate since last Fall.
Instead, he was a Johnny One Note, obsessing about how the evil world and bad trade deals are eating up American jobs. The rest of his message—about immigration, crime, and economic growth—was swallowed up in a bizarre display of vintage Trumpisms including meandering digressions justifying his five-year “birther” crusade against alien Obama, and his “smart” dodging of federal income taxes, his tax returns he still won’t reveal.
Hillary was prepared, competent, and in good form. She landed no knockout punches, but scored a TKO. Except that for true believing Trump voters, none of this will matter.
Voters in the middle—had he been a different Donald—would have broken for him, giving him a 3-4 point spread in the national polls by the end of this week that she would never have made up. Instead, she will be up 3-4 points.
Unfortunately for her, polls after the first debate gradually return toward the mean. In the second debate, if his Jewish son-in-law and female campaign manager have any influence on him, he won’t change message so much, but will massage his persona to appear less threatening. The media will be primed to portray him as an underdog and then as “the comeback kid.”
Hillary is still a weak candidate with the mixed blessing of the support of Barack Obama, a president against whom Trump is subliminally running as: “remember, I am the white guy, not the multicolor academic poseur who has threatened the tranquility of our golf resorts the day after Saint Arnold Palmer has left us down here on earth with an uppity president unfit to be his caddy.”
