Clinton fends off aggressive Trump in scalding first debate

WASHINGTON: She won, but he didn’t lose. She did what she was expected of her given her long years in public service – look and sound assured, and confidently offer a measure of continuity and direction for America. He did better than anticipated because expectations were so low – managing not to blow up or melt down, and offering diagnosis and prescription from the perspective of an outsider.

Presenting contrasting analysis and vision, Hillary

Clinton

and Donald

Trump

had 90-minutes of sharp exchanges during the first

Presidential

debate on Monday, at the end of which neither candidate appeared to have made a winning impression on the undecided voters who will decide the election. Most analysts and pundits called the

debate

for Hillary Clinton, which is not surprising given the inherent liberal bias among large sections of the media and the illuminati. The verdict was less clear on social media where anonymity allows free reign to illiberal opinion. #TrumpWon was trending at #1 in US and many online polls pulled for Trump.

The consensus in the commentariat is Hillary Clinton put in the stronger performance, but Trump was no pushover. "If he just turns up and does not vomit on stage, he’d have done well," one pundit said wryly before the debate, and as it turned out, he did better than that, turning in a competent, if prickly, performance.

But the needle of support barely moved in either direction, with very few minds changed and polls showing a near dead-heat in the race to the White House five weeks before Election Day.

There were several Trump-ian moments during the debate that would have destroyed a traditional candidate in a conventional election. But this being an extraordinary election, Trump rode on the bloomers as he put Hillary on the defense with counterattacks: Among the flubs: boasting that he was "smart" enough to avoid taxes, justifying cashing in on the housing collapse ("that’s called business, by the way," he sneered) and defending his sexist remarks about women, with the odious clarification that he was right in calling one of them (actress Rosie O’Donnell) a fat pig.

Trump also repeated the lies he has essayed throughout the campaign about his opposition to the Iraq War (he’s on record supporting it) and blaming Clinton for the birther controversy that suggested Barack Obama was born abroad.

The dissembling made no difference to Trump supporters, a representative sample of which was the first to break protocol in the Hoffstra University auditorium by loudly cheering him when he attacked Clinton.

Trump’s major trump card was the blunt and simple question he posed more than once to Hillary Clinton: If you have the answers to all the problems besetting America, why haven’t you fixed it for 30 years? Alluding to her as a conventional status quo-ist politician ("all talk, no action"), Trump posed himself as a doer who could fix things in a jiffy, even as he presented a dire picture of an America of high crime and low morale, being ripped off and taken to the cleaners by friends, allies, and rivals.

Clinton barely managed to fend off the inaction rap (Trump would later say she has experience, but it is "bad experience"), mainly by attacking Trump’s temperament and lack of qualification to lead America in a complex world. She first fingered him about his inherited wealth and privileged life, skillfully contrasting it with her own modest, middle-class upbringing, a comparison that clearly got under Trump’s skin.

Then she exposed his lack of grasp about complex global issues, such as nuclear weapons policy, where Trump gave a contradictory answer (he is against first strike but wont take anything off the table). "A man who can be provoked by a tweet should not have his fingers anywhere near the nuclear codes," Clinton jibed, referring to several "cavalier" remarks Trump has made about US nuclear policy.

In turn, Trump obliquely jabbed at her poor health (as per right-wing scuttlebutt), saying she "doesn’t have the stamina" to be President. Considering both are around 70, they did pretty well under the arc lights for 90 minutes, with no commercial or bathroom breaks.

Clinton had the last word on the issue of health: "As soon as he travels to 112 countries and negotiates a peace deal, a cease-fire, a release of dissidents, opening of new opportunities in nations around the world or even spends 11 hours testifying in front of a congressional committee, he can talk to me about stamina."