Whoever 'Won,' America Lost

Editor's Note: Posting may be irregular due to impacts from Hurricane Francine, which will affect our area after making landfall this afternoon or evening. Thank you for your patience.

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"Harris 'won' the debate, and is clearly lesser evil than Trump. But still sad these are options before us. Out of 330 million people, we should be able to do better. The thought of it almost makes want to eat a cat..." -- Ilya Somin

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The Washington Examiner laid out what each candidate would need to do yesterday evening to win the presidential "debate:"

If Harris is going to turn the momentum of this race in her favor, she will need to do more than dole out pablum about a "new way forward." She must explain what her positions are, how they are different from Biden's, and why they are different from those of the far more left-wing Harris who ran against Biden in 2020.

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For Trump, the plan should be simple, but that does not mean it will be easy for him to execute. All he has to do is remind voters that Harris is part of the Biden administration, which has been in government since 2021, that the Biden administration is unpopular for a reason, and that, if anything, Harris is further to the left of Biden on every issue.

These are all easily established facts, but Trump will be sorely tempted to denigrate Harris personally... [bold added]

This is not bad, but the bar was actually even lower for Trump. To paraphrase Yaron Brook, All Trump had to do was convince voters he's sane.

Close, Examiner, but no cigar.

The Examiner did nail another important bit of context:

... Tuesday's clash will be more significant than other presidential debates because Harris is intentionally unknown to most of the country. Whether they love or hate him, people know who Trump is and how he will govern. The same cannot be said of Harris. In the most recent New York Times poll showing Trump beating Harris 48% to 47%, 90% of voters said they "pretty much already know" what they need to know about Trump, but almost 30% of voters said they felt the need to "learn more" about Harris.

This is as close as a paper is going to get to a joke I recently saw on X/Twitter: I can't vote for Trump because I know what I'd get, and I can't vote for Harris because I don't know what I'd get.

I didn't watch the debate and probably wouldn't have, even if we didn't have a hurricane bearing down on our area, but if the video embedded below is any indication, Trump failed to pass the sanity/isn't a nut test.

Allegations of cat-eating may be red meat to the Trump base, but they will put off anyone with any sense.

Setting aside his unfitness for office, Trump's biggest problem is that, by choosing to pitch himself seemingly exclusively to kooks, he is repelling the sane undecideds he needs to win, and who will not necessarily know or care how far to the left Harris is. Her laughing when Trump babbles about pets being eaten is a direct parallel to his standing off to the side while a senile Biden blathered during that "debate."

No. I'm not going to waste my time on that silly new anti-immigrant trope. You can go here for that. (There is no time stamp or transcript as of this writing, but if I recall correctly, that discussion is early.)

-- CAV