The first debate is behind us, and from my point of view it was pretty much a draw, with Lester Holt, a partisan moderator, aiding a heavily scripted-scripted Hillary Clinton. edging a rather ill-prepared Donald Trump I must admit being disappointed in the opportunities Trump missed to score solid points. Here are a few.
Donald Trump should have said: “I find it humorous, Lester, that you asked Hillary about her plan to handle cyber-attacks when, in fact, she couldn’t even identify a classified document. And remember when she was asked if she wiped her server clean and she responded, ‘with a cloth or something?’ before admitting she ‘didn’t know how it works digitally at all.’”
Then there was the instance when Hillary was attempting to persuade everyone that she had the stamina to be president, “When he travels to 112 countries, negotiations on peace deals, cease fires, and 11 hours before a congressional committee, he can talk to me about stamina.”
Trump should have retorted with, “I certainly won’t be spending time before a congressional committee lying about a failure to protect Americans as you did in Benghazi. Speaking of which … everyone, everyone knows you let them down and you lied to their parents. You failed.”
Trump missed a big opportunity to win the evening on the subject of taxes. He adequately described the no-growth economic failure of the Obama administration, but when she referred to the economic success of her husband’s presidency he should have reminded her of his caving to then House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Rep. John Kasich on the budget.
More importantly, he could also have cited how President Kennedy engineered a nine-year run of 5 per cent annual growth by lowering taxes, and how President Reagan followed the Kennedy model, lowering the taxes even further and leading to decades of 4-5 per cent growth.
I believe we will see a different Trump in the next debate. Do I need to remind you that Obama clearly lost in his first debate with Mitt Romney?
“It ain’t over till it’s over.” – Yogi Berra
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