With the enthusiasm of someone about to undergo a root canal, I dutifully tuned in to the first presidential debate. I expected nothing but painful exasperation, but I was surprised, although not in a good way. It turns out that I know Donald Trump personally.
I recognized him as the boor you sometimes see in a bar. While Trump is not known to be a drinker, I swear I know him. So, perhaps it wasn't a bar where I saw him, maybe it was at a social gathering in someone's house where the poor host was left mortified.
You know this guy, too. He is the character our parents taught us never to be. He is the guy holding forth in an obnoxious voice, full of himself, arrogant and self-centered, knowing little but saying a lot, interrupting, speaking over the person who challenges him, claiming everything is wonderful if he is the subject, insisting everything is horrible when he is talking about someone else.
So went the debate. Hillary Clinton was calm, mostly civil, patient, well-prepared and professional. Donald Trump was an unprepared, ill-mannered jerk. He had neither command of the facts nor mastery of his own personality. Sadly, that is why I think he may have won the night.
That may seem contrary, but debates occur in the culture of their times. In a sane world, Clinton would be judged the winner, but that is the very world willfully abandoned by many Americans. They may suppose a debate is just a shouting match; it's all just words and the important thing is to steamroll your opponent with them. This he did.
He was helped by a culture that has become fact-free and in thrall of the Big Lie as practiced by the Nazis, the idea that if you tell a lie big enough and often enough, people eventually will come to believe it, no matter how absurd.
Conservatives have always been experts at demonizing political enemies such as the Clintons. From the beginning, one of my objections to Hillary Clinton was that she came pre-demonized by past exposure.
No one had to work at it. She was like dehydrated food being served to the wolves; all her critics needed to do was add water to complete the demonizing process. Instead, the liquid they added was bile.
So, now she supposedly can't be trusted by people who support a candidate who barely can make an utterance without breaking or bending the truth. Here is a preposterous irony rife with hypocrisy. It would be like a madam at Miss Flossy's House of Naughty Fun criticizing a rival establishment for a lack of morals.
Still, it is true that Clinton has sometimes been reckless with the truth, but in comparison with Donald Trump she is an amateur. Credit where credit is due _ the guy is a master of serial whoppers. If he had Pinocchio's nose, he wouldn't be able to fit in his own limousine.
All this was on ample display Monday night. We should pity Lester Holt, NBC's nominal moderator. He did his best, but there is no moderating the chronically immoderate. Holt could have had a lion tamer's chair and a whip, but the golden-maned carnivore known as Donald Trump is beyond instruction. Trump claims the right of the highly privileged and speaks when he wants to speak _ which he did often while going off on tangents to avoid answering the questions.
I hope the kiddies were in bed for this perverse civics lesson. Heck, I wish I had been in bed. Yet some delicious moments of high comedy occurred _ such as when Trump insisted that his greatest asset was his winning temperament, this after showing the world that he has the temperament of a bull in a china shop.
I also liked the suggestion that he was the best hope of black Americans _ why, he loves them so much he wants to empower the police to stop and frisk them just like the old days in New York City.
That should do wonders for the nation's race relations.
And how about his complaints that Hillary Clinton runs mean TV ads? What nerve that gal has! How dare she criticize the great man!
You couldn't make some of this stuff up. In fact, if a novelist had written this 12 months ago, his editor would have sent him back for a rewrite for being ridiculous. Such a man could never be the candidate of a party with a storied history. Now we have come to this. Shame on us.
