What we learned from the “Commander-in-Chief” exercise the other night is: (a) neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump is fastidious about facts, (b) Matt Lauer is a nice guy but not up to presidential politics, and (c) voters expecting better in the “real” debate September 26 should not hold their breaths. “Why wasn’t it disqualifying?” Most voters, and all the more so undecided voters, subsist on a news diet supplied by the likes of Matt Lauer. “Can we afford to take that risk?”
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The Daily Show host was the first to note kamikaze planes had crashed into the USS Intrepid, now docked in New York City and where the forum was held, and point out Lauer had continued that tradition with his moderating gig. At a speech in Cleveland, he tagged his Democratic opponent with a new nickname – “trigger-happy Hillary” and repeated his incorrect claim that he opposed the war in Iraq “from the beginning”.
The Clinton campaign-not to mention every sentient human being whose last name isn’t Trump or who doesn’t draw a paycheck from someone with that last name-is angry at Matt Lauer for his handling of last night’s primetime “commander-in-chief” presidential forum.
The NBC “Today” show host wasn’t talking on Thursday, laying low on a day the hashtag “Lauering the Bar” trended on Twitter. Surrenders? That’s not the forum I saw. However, Washington Post reports that Trump’s claim has been refuted multiple times.
“Lauer’s performance was not merely a failure, it was horrifying and shocking”, wrote Jonathan Chait in NY magazine. But then, look where he’s coming from, writing that people like Lauer “are failing to convey the fact that the election pits a normal politician with normal political failings against an ignorant, bigoted, pathologically dishonest authoritarian”. The clock is ticking.
Former Obama White House speechwriter Jon Favreau wrote: “I don’t blame Lauer for asking the email question”.
There was also carping on the right.
The first moment came when Clinton responded to a question from the audience, saying she didn’t mishandle classified documents through the use of her private email server. “But I have no faith in Hillary Clinton or the leadership”. Clinton replied, “I have been somewhat heartened by the number of articles recently pointing out the quite disparate treatment of Trump and his campaign compared to ours- I don’t understand the reasons for it”. But much of the rest of what I’ve seen is thinly disguised anti-Trumpism.
Clinton elaborated on those remarks at the Thursday press conference, saying putting a significant number of USA troops on the ground in Iraq and Syria would “fulfill one of (ISIS’) dearest wishes which is to drag the United States back into a ground war in that region”.
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Russian leaders, American generals, sensitive e-mails, and more, all of it the stuff of the presidential campaign over the past 24 hours. No matter what they do, the moderators will be subjected to plenty of polarized punditry or toxic tweets.
