Please stop, America. Please stop, American national "press" corps who couldn't find their backsides with two hands and the help of three network producers each. We are debating who will be leading our country for the next four years, and still you insist on grading the obvious lunatic based on whether or not he visibly soils himself onstage.
NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell said that it won't be "appealing" for Clinton to look like "the studious schoolmarm constantly saying you're wrong about that, that's a lie" in the debate, but she said that Trump "could go 90 minutes, misstating facts let's say, but looking smooth, being the performer" as long as he adopts "an acceptable new norm" of behavior rather than “bullying her.”
This is an embarrassing, hopefully self-humiliating thing for an Actual Honest To God Journalist to opine. So it's alright if future President Pumpkin Spice "misstates facts" so long as he sounds better than that irritating know-it-all at podium two and so long as he is genteel enough to ... what? Not throw feces? The standard of behavior that the media deems "acceptable" for a presidential candidate continues to slide to meet Donald Trump's behavior, whatever that behavior has turned out to be. A presidential candidate not releasing basic financial information would at one point have been considered scandalous. A presidential candidate repeatedly, over the course of the entire campaign, provably lying about his own past statements would once have been evidence of an unstable mind.
Now? Donald Trump could walk to the edge of the stage and spit on individual audience members and Andrea Mitchell would come up with some rationale as to why pundits ought not pass judgment on that sort of thing.
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CNN political commentator and Trump supporter John Phillips said, “The bar has been set so low that he's going to go out there and I think he's going to shock people and show them that there's a lot more to him,” adding that “expectations for Hillary are going to be very high in these debates. The expectations for Donald Trump, not as much.”
An alternative idea: The expectations should be that each candidate demonstrate to us why the hell we ought to trust them with our government agencies, our military, and our nuclear weapons. We don't have to be pedantic about it, but at the very least we might want that person to, oh, know what those various government agencies are and why it is we came to have them. We might query them as to whether it would be Good or Bad if nation so-and-so acquired nuclear weapons. We might ask them to debate whether the notion of NATO has run its course, or what precise valuation of the Chinese currency would or would not require a frothing military response from us. It is perfectly all right for us to have certain lower-bar standards on these things. This is, after all, a job interview.
New York Times reporter Yamiche Alcindor said the Clinton campaign has “been battling this idea that … she's in some ways held to a higher standard than Donald Trump” while a "lot of people are going to look at Donald Trump and think, hey, if he can even get out a good sentence and show off his experience, then he's doing well.”
Which is a hell of a thing, because we have to presume that however we're judging the candidates' behavior now is how we will be judging the presidency later. And is that how it's going to work? Is that what pundits this time next year will be standing in front of television cameras and reporting, standing gormlessly outside the White House or on the steps of Capitol Hill?
President Trump got a good sentence out today. In other news, North Korea announced ...
You know what? We can all see exactly that is happening. We all know that that scenario is indeed precisely how it would play out, in twelve months. Or, if it goes in the other direction, perhaps we will be inundated next summer with pundit columns about how perhaps the sitting president knows what she is doing and maybe the world economy is doing so-so, or whateverz, but her studious schoolmarm demeanor is just so gosh-darn irritating.
Forget this noise. I'm taking all your punditry licenses away. No punditry from anyone until everyone on television each submits a two-page essay outlining the basic duties and functions of the Executive Branch. Double spaced is fine, twelve point font.