Presidential debates are very odd beasts. In most debates your objective is to meet your standard of proof and hammer home your point. Presidential debates on the other hand are to a certain extent political theater. The person who wins the debate is the person who gets the most out of it in terms of popular support, not necessarily the person who actually wins the ‘debate’.

It is often said that in politics you are usually playing in an empty stadium. The debate, where hundreds of millions of people watch the candidates perform in real time, is one of the few exceptions to this rule. Consequently debate night is one of the best opportunities to change the narrative of the campaign, influence the broad thematic messaging and create genuine moments of contrast between the two candidates. So they are always quite important.

In a close election such as this that importance is magnified. But what exactly is each candidate trying to do?

Clinton has very little to prove on the stage. She has done this a million times before. Everyone already assumes she can be articulate, knowledgeable and disciplined. Reinforcing those perceptions is always valuable, but is not her primary aim. What she needed to do last night was knock Trump off his game, consolidate her image as the adult in the room and allow Trump all the rope he needs with which to hang himself.

Trump, on the other hand, has a very great deal to prove. Having eaten away Clinton’s lead almost entirely over the last seven weeks, last night was Trump’s moment to show he could be more moderate, more restrained, more presidential and convince the American people that they could live with him in the oval office for 4 years. While Clinton needed to avoid being knocked out, Trump was under some pressure to deliver something of a bloody nose to the former Secretary of State. So how did they do?

Clinton

Well, let’s start with Clinton. Because she frankly makes a lot more sense, and is thus easier to analyse. She had two main avenues of attack:

1. Trump’s plan is vestigial at best, is trickle-down economics that will benefit only the few and has no detail. Whereas my plan will invest in you, invest in jobs, infrastructure and raise the minimum wage.
2. Trump himself, his biography and his values.

These two points are mutually supporting. He has bad policy because he has bad values, and his bad policy displays his bad values. She showed a clear understanding of the issues, was able to explain her plan simply and link it to peoples lives. She kept repeating that line, invest in you. I like that formulation, as it shows not just a contrast of policy but a contrast in terms of values and focus. It is implicit in the statement that Trump cares more about himself and less about you than Clinton.

But the attacks on Trump are where I think the real story in this debate is. Clinton needled Trump over his serial bankruptcy, his habitual use of illegal labour, his consistent fraud against contractors and his probable avoidance of income taxes average Americans have no option but to pay. These are the moments when it was visibly obvious how irritated Trump was. My only criticism on this score is that she didn’t really close the deal. Look at this quotation for instance:

‘Do the thousands of people that you have stiffed over the course of your business not deserve some kind of apology from someone who has taken their labor, taken the goods that they produced, and then refused to pay them? I can only say that I’m certainly relieved that my late father never did business with you. He provided a good middle-class life for us, but the people he worked for, he expected the bargain to be kept on both sides.’

This is a great way to discredit Trump’s business record, and turn it into a liability. But in my humble opinion, if she had ended with something to clarify in the minds of everyone watching that she is the custodian of American values of hard work and fairness it would have had more impact. ‘The American people deserve a president who understands a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, not one who will rob them blind and declare bankruptcy’ or some such formulation.

On the whole, I think Clinton did very well. She avoided getting knocked down, landed a few punches and allowed her opponent to flail wildly and expend his energy fruitlessly. She needs to sharpen her answers on trade and come up with a way of distancing herself from the legacy of Obama and her husband while maintaining ownership of the values people associate with them. Some sort of ‘I’m running for President, not my husband. Get it right, Donald’ type maneuver.

Trump

Oh dear. Now I’m afraid this is where the wheels come off. Analyzing Donald Trump’s debating style is like analyzing the flight-path of a flightless bird. He fails to meet even elementary standards of proof, evidence, argumentation and honesty. If he had been one of the debaters I used to coach there would have been stern words at the end of the night.

So let’s start with the good. That I can analyse. He landed some good knocks early on about trade, that perennial driver of his candidacy. He paints a picture using very dark hues, a picture where the American people are being bled white by incompetently administered and fallaciously conceived trade agreements. Canny operators all over the world, from China to Dubai, are eating away the substance of the U.S Economy in some highly conspiratorial and underhanded manner.

That is a persuasive narrative. It appeals to sundry fictions and prejudices, and like most false arguments tries to make a simple summation of a complex problem. A summation that is easy to believe, and seductive in its capacity to re-enforce what you already think.

But then Clinton started asking him how he would fix it. And… there is just nothing there. The Emperor has no clothes. So that fizzled out a bit.

Trump also made some headway by painting Clinton as the establishment candidate. This is the obvious and wise move, pinning the entire status quo on her at a time when the establishment is monstrously unpopular.

But Trump has run into a problem. He is no longer crowded on a stage with 9 other guys, fighting for time. And it really seems like he is just intellectually and temperamentally incapable of speaking at length in a cogent fashion. Where once the camera would have cut away to some other participant, now he is stuck staring down into the hungering darkness of the lens.

Did you notice how he never gives specifics? Not just about facts and figures, but about anything at all really. Everything is ‘tremendous’, ‘great’, ‘big’ or ‘terrible’. All numbers are converted to ‘many’, ‘huge’ or the aforementioned ‘tremendous’. It’s like he thinks in some kind of idiot-algebra, plugging meaningless modifiers into rafts of pablum and lashing them together with the words ‘really’ ‘it’s true’ or my personal favorite ‘I’m right’. Perhaps he can survive from soundbite to soundbite, but under the glare of the stage-lights you can see his whole thought process whirring like a merry-go-round. Starting in one place, running the full gamut of his vocabulary and returning to the start making no more sense than it did before. This would not pass muster in a first year university course. ‘Tremendous scholars agree….’, ‘Huge problems with that thesis’. You would be laughed out of the room.

In case you think I’m being pejorative here, let’s look at some examples of him just tossing together word salad right before our eyes.

• ‘And look at her website. You know what? It’s no difference than this. She’s telling us how to fight ISIS. Just go to her website. She tells you how to fight ISIS on her website. I don’t think General Douglas MacArthur would like that too much.
  • Here he seems to be implying that revealing your policy on ISIS is somehow tipping your hand. As if ISIS cares about our tactics in the first place. But notice the confused tone? The call and response? The way he repeats points line on line he has already made? And why its important what Dougy MacArthur thought about anything is utterly beyond me.
• ‘See, you’re telling the enemy everything you want to do. No wonder you’ve been fighting — no wonder you’ve been fighting ISIS your entire adult life.’
  • So either he thinks Clinton is 20 or that ISIS is 50. Alternatively, he is unable to speak sensibly in public. All three options are concerning.

• ‘Well, I’m really calling for major jobs, because the wealthy are going create tremendous jobs. They’re going to expand their companies. They’re going to do a tremendous job.’
  • Tremendous! Major, Tremendous jobs! Don’t ask me how, just know that it’s going to be tremendous. He uses this word like he just found it in the dictionary yesterday.
• ‘The Fed is doing political — by keeping the interest rates at this level. And believe me: The day Obama goes off, and he leaves, and goes out to the golf course for the rest of his life to play golf, when they raise interest rates, you’re going to see some very bad things happen, because the Fed is not doing their job. The Fed is being more political than Secretary Clinton.’
  • Is he making a criticism of the policy of quantitative easing? Perhaps he has some thoughts on monetary policy and achieving growth without inflation? We will never know, because this statement makes no sense. He never follows it up, never explains himself. I wonder if even he knows what he means.
• ‘The Obama administration, from the time they’ve come in, is over 230 years’ worth of debt, and he’s topped it. He’s doubled it in a course of almost eight years, seven-and-a-half years, to be semi- exact.’
  • I have no earthly idea what he is talking about here. What is 230 years worth of debt? How does one be ‘semi-exact’? Forget that he seems to think syntax is for other people, I’m not totally convinced he understands how a budget works. Or else he is just lying. That is probably more likely.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. And if you look into his business history and his idea of his own talent, it kinda makes sense. In The Art of the Deal, Trump basically recommends this sort thing. His entire career has been built on either sweetheart deals with politicians to avoid taxes and such things or talking up his assets and their value to an insane degree. It’s a kind of braggadocio business model where acumen and mendacity are interchangeable. My point is this isn’t a perversity of Trump-As-Candidate. This is the garden variety Donald. This is how he operates. This is, in a very real sense, his business. His brand is his asset, and he rents that asset to his creditors in exchange for them allowing him to continue to live in the building with his name on it.

So who won the debate? Well, we won’t really know that until the polls start to come out. There are a few already, but none I particularly trust. But on points you would have to give it to Clinton. It is clear to me now that, having watched Trump for a year and a half now, we have seen all there is to see of him. David Axelrod calls running for president an ‘MRI for the soul’. Whoever you really are at bottom will come out. Trump has no more rabbits to pull out of his hat. What you see really is what you get, as disappointing as that may be.

If I had to make a bet I would say that Clinton made more headway than Trump. But I will be surprised if it moves the polls by more than a couple of points. This is going to be a long, grinding slog of an election campaign that will probably come down to mobilizing the base and getting the voters you need to the polls rather than any kind of nuanced argument.

Lyndon Johnson’s dictum on elections was that you win by ‘not losing’. Clinton didn’t lose yesterday, and if she continues to not lose she may in fact become President. Because Trump needs to knock her down to build himself up. Clinton just needs to keep moving forward.