First Debate : a Draw or Win for Trump - "Hillary has experience, but it's bad experience."

The first presidential debate of 2016 is history. Who won or lost will be long argued, but several things are clear. Trump summed up his argument early in the debate when he said : "It's time that we have someone running this country who has an idea about money." That comment came during the first half hour, when he shredded Hillary Clinton on her leftist tax-and-spend ideas for the economy and jobs. Trump is the master of these topics and since the economy was the most googled phrase during the debate, we can guess that Trump's concise summaries about how to fix the economy and create jobs resonated with the TV audience. He made the point that Democrat economic policies have harmed all Americans, but black and hispanic Americans most. Then in the closing moments of the debate, Trump again hit a home run : “Hillary has experience, but it’s bad experience.” These two comments sum up the debate. ~~~~~ Debate moderator Lester Holt didn't manage his role very well. Holt arrived Monday night as a news anchor with a reputation for being a non-partisan newsman. But, as The-Day-After rolls on, 40% of the country are questioning that description. Before the debate, Holt said he wanted to be largely invisible and let Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton talk. He followed that plan, allowing the exchanges to simply unfold. This led to some of the more heated moments of the debate, with Clinton and, more often, Trump interrupting the other's comments. The problems came when Holt stopped being invisible -- he targeted Trump's weaknesses (releasing his taxes, the birther issue) while avoiding Clinton's weaknesses (those 33,000 emails and her illegal server, the Clinton Foundation pay-for-play scam while she was Secretary of State). As we have witnessed during this entire general election campaign, only Trump gets fact-checked while Hillary largely gets a pass. Lester Holt continued down that biased journalistic path Monday evening. Here are two examples of the bias cited by Fox News : (1). "Fact check #1 : TRUMP: You called it the gold standard of trade deals. You said it’s the finest deal you’ve ever seen. CLINTON : No. TRUMP: And then you heard what I said about it, and all of a sudden you were against it. CLINTON: Well, Donald, I know you live in your own reality, but that is not the facts. The facts are -- I did say I hoped it would be a good deal, but when it was negotiated." THE FACTS : Clinton never used the word “hoped.” She said “gold standard” during her tenure as Secretary of State. It had been raised multiple times by Bernie Sanders during the primaries and Holt should have been ready. Fox News asked : "Does Holt correct or fact-check here? No. But was decidedly aggressive when challenging Trump's claim on always being against the Iraq War, and that's fine. But if the decision was made by Holt beforehand to fact-check in real time, he needed to do so to both sides in obvious situations. This was one of them." (2). "Fact check #2: Clinton says the murder rate is down in New York City under Bill DeBlasio without Stop & Frisk. Stop & Frisk's last year of existence was 2014. In 2015, the only full year of records without it in New York City, murders went up, rising to 352 from 333 the year before. Trump kept insisting on this number, Clinton insisted he was wrong. Holt let it go." ~~~~~~ We can only hope that the next two debates will be unbiased enough to address key topics that favor Trump : (1) the Clinton Foundation that has been in the news for all the wrong reasons; and (2) direct questions about destroying evidence and deleting tens of thousands of emails and then lying about it. Trump got in several barbs on this issue, but had to fit them into answers about other issues. That Holt left these white hot topics on the cutting room floor begs the question, "What was his aim as debate moderator?" These are critically important issues, going to the heart of Clinton's qualification to be President. No objective moderator would leave them untouched while hitting Trump about minor items. Holt didn't merely 'forget' to mention them. Ignoring them had to be planned. Trump should have brought up those topics himself, as Fox says : "particularly when one broad subject was cyber security, which couldn't have teed up Clinton's extreme carelessness around handling classified information any better. He didn't." Two other topics begged to be raised. How could Holt completely ignore immigration -- one of the cornerstones of Trump's campaign?? And equally mindboggling is Holt's avoidance of the topic of Clinton's health. Given her collapse into a van after leaving a 9/11 event early, and her 2102 blood clot and hospitalization, the very least Holt should have done was to ask Clinton why she will not release her full medical records as John McCain did to the tune of 1,173 pages in 2008. But, as Americans have sadly learned during the 2106 presidential campaign, media fact-checking is a one way street. The fact-checking has only one goal -- to throw Donald Trump under the bus. Sorry, Lester -- you are now vying to be the Candy Crowley of the 2016 debates. ~~~~~~ Rudy Giuliani said it loud and clear. He believes there was inappropriate meddling on Monday by Lester Holt : "If I were Donald Trump, I wouldn't participate in another debate unless I was promised the journalist would act like a journalist, and not an ignorant fact check. My advice would be the moderator would have to promise they'd be a moderator." [Where Giuliani would find such a journalist-moderator is far from clear -- maybe Mars.] While Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said after Monday night's debate that Trump would participate in the final two debates, it was Giuliani who put the media on high alert, giving a scathing review of Holt as moderator, charging that his "interference" in a discussion about policing in New York was "outrageous." Here, Giuliani is the 'Living Fact Check.' He was the mayor of NYC who put Stop & Frisk in place. It was continued under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It was halted by Democrat Mayor Bill DeBlasio. Giuliani said : "If journalism has ethics, Lester Holt unethically interferred in the area of law he knows nothing about. It [Stop & Frisk] is not unconstitutional and Trump's description of that case was correct." THE FACTS: Holt corrected Trump's explanation of Stop & Frisk, a program Giuliani approved as NYC mayor, in which police search people they stop for questioning, saying it "was ruled unconstitutional in New York" as disproportionately targeting minorities. A New York circuit court judge ruled the practice unconstitutional, but a higher court never settled the question because current NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio stopped the program. Giuliani said that Holt's interruption of Trump reminded him of 2012 moderator Candy Crowley's decision to step in to correct Mitt Romney : "He's five times Candy Crowley." ~~~~~~ Donald Trump is his own best critic. Trump said he feels he did "really well" in Monday night's debate : "I thought it went really well. I had some hostile questions. That was okay. It was the debate of debates." Trump said he would give NBC News' moderator Lester Holt "about a C or C-plus" rating, and he thinks the anchorman did a good job overall, but said Holt did not ask Clinton many questions that he thought should have been asked : "Well, he didn't ask her about the emails at all. He didn't ask her about her scandals. He didn't ask her about the Benghazi deal that she destroyed. He didn't ask her about a lot of things she should have been asked about. There's no question about it. He didn't ask about her Foundation." But, Trump refused to say that Holt did a bad job, even though he hit him hard on the last four questions of the debate : "They were leaving all her little goodies out. I was asked about my tax returns, which I've told about 500 times. But I think I really did well, when we were asked normal questions. I think I did really well in answering those questions, but those [other] questions are not answerable in a positive light." Trump also said he could have hit Clinton with the scandals concerning her husband's infidelities, after her attacks on him about his statements about women but he didn't do so because daughter Chelsea was in the room : "I think I did the right thing. It's not worth a point. I didn't feel comfortable doing it with Chelsea in the room. I think Chelsea is a fine young lady. I didn't like doing it with Chelsea in the room." [Is there any politician in the world who puts an opponent's child above winning a point?] Trump said he wishes he'd brought up Benghazi : "Don't forget, you are asked a question as to progress or something, and it's hard to get off to Benghazi sometimes the way the questions were framed. You start off in a totally -- the opposite of Benghazi, and so Benghazi can't get brought up, but it was a very interesting evening." In addition, Trump said he thought the first half of the evening went well, but "in the end, they start bringing up 45-year-old lawsuits," and Holt : "leaned over to that [left] lane, but I don't know, every poll -- I won Slate. I won Drudge [Report], I got almost 90% of the vote in the poll. I won Time magazine. I won CBS. I won every single poll other than CNN and not many people are watching CNN. I tell you what, that place is a disaster. The people they have on those shows, they are third rate talent as announcers on that show. The moderators. They are terrible." When asked about the tax return issue, Trump repeated his offer to release his tax returns when Clinton releases her 33,000 deleted emails. After the debate, Clinton Director of Communications Jennifer Palmieri commented that he wouldn't release the tax returns because "he didn't pay any....He's not given the American people the most basic information that we expect." Trump called that "spin," and told Fox News Tuesday his decision had nothing to do with that : "I just said, 'Hey, I will go against my lawyer's orders if you release your 33,000 deleted emails,' which I'm sure she could get. But you know, they would be very dangerous for her to get...unless Julian Assange releases them for her. He's supposedly out there. He is saying he's releasing something which will be interesting. Let's find out what he will release." ~~~~~ Trump said he may hit Clinton harder in the next debate. He told Fox News : "I really eased up because I didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings. I had a problem with a microphone that didn't work. My microphone was terrible. I wonder if it was it set up that way on purpose. My microphone in the room, they couldn't hear me. It was going on and off. Which isn't exactly great. When I tested, it was beautiful, like an hour before." Rejecting conspiracy theories, Trump added : "but it was much lower than hers and it was crackling and she didn't have that problem. That to me was a bad problem, you have a bum mike, that's not exactly good." He also blamed the microphone on reports that he'd sniffled throughout the debate : "The mike was very bad, but maybe it was good enough to hear breathing, but there was no sniffles." In what may be a surprise for many, Trump said he doesn't think Clinton was one of his toughest debate opponents. According to Trump : "I think Ted Cruz was tough. I think that Marco [Rubio] was actually very tough. He had a breakdown, a little breakdown once. But he was a good debater." ~~~~~~ Dear readers, the CNN/ORC instant poll immediately after the debate suggested that 62% of viewers believed Clinton won the debate against 27% for Trump. The equivalent poll four years before had given Republican Mitt Romney a near-identical margin of victory over President Obama (67%-25%). BUT, 41% of respondents in the CNN poll on Monday were Democrats, compared to 26% who were Republican. So, as CNN pointed out when it released the results, the poll result is slanted toward Clinton. But TheHill's online poll, that is still taking votes, shows that Trump won the debate, with Trump at 58% and Clinton at 36%. As of Monday noon, 127,076 people had voted. I find one fact interesting : is seems that more Democrats than Republicans watched the debate. Did some Trump voters just tune out, anticipating that the debate would be biased toward Hillary? Or were they simply unable to support the prospect of watching Hillary Clinton for 90 minutes? It was hard to watch her lie so smoothly while she smugly looked down her nose at Donald Trump -- and I wonder if that gaze with her head tilted back and her eyes almost closed is a way of protecting her eyes from TV lights that could trigger a 'spell.' If you watch some of her You Tube videos, that 'down-her-nose' look is often in evidence. But, in his own way and style, Trump held his ground and delivered his message : jobs, debt, law and order, the failure of government to do anything for Americans, especially black and hispanic Americans. My advice to the Trump team is not to rehearse him too much. He has a command of the facts -- that was clear last night. He is the outsider-citizen countering the insider-elite Hillary Clinton, with her memorized, boring, and heartless, answers to any question. Trump described her attitude as "holier than thou." Thank goodness, Donald Trump brings heart and passion, as well as facts, to his mission to make America Great Again. That is why he connects with Americans. That is why he is taking over as the poll leader. That is why hundreds of thousands of Americans have flocked to rallies to hear him speak. And, that is why millions of Americans are going to vote for him. The last thing America needs is a carbon copy of Hillary Clinton. Turn Trump loose. Let him be Trump.