Why, jab? ~ I'm actually MUCH more concerned about the Bossie hire [see post #141 on our "DT's 'people'" thread] ~

Sooz

Emailgate! Benghazigate, Clintonfoundationgate, all over again, softballs to Trump, perhaps a little border wall discussion.
Wallace is smart enough to make it appear unbiased.

Agreed ... but Wallace is only possible choice in the Fox stable of loons ~

If you really want to make your toes curl, look at post #143 that I just posted in our "DT's 'people'" thread ~

Sooz

The sum of DT: the con man sees no need to "prep" ~ ~ Sooz

TPM LIVEWIRE
Clinton Camp Consulting 'Art Of The Deal' Ghostwriter For Trump Debate Prep
By Caitlin MacNeal Published August 30, 2016, 10:31 AM EDT

As preparation for the upcoming debates, the Hillary Clinton campaign has talked with the ghostwriter of Donald Trump's book "The Art of the Deal" to get a better understanding of the Republican nominees insecurities, the New York Times reported.

Writer Tony Schwartz told the New Yorker in July that he regrets helping Trump with the 1980s bestseller. He called Trump a "sociopath" and said that the real estate mogul has a "completely compulsive" need for attention.

The Clinton campaign has also consulted psychology experts to try to predict how Trump will respond to certain issues, according to the New York Times.

Meanwhile, Trump has declined to prepare for the debates much at all.

“I believe you can prep too much for those things,” Trump told the Times last week. “It can be dangerous. You can sound scripted or phony — like you’re trying to be someone you’re not.”

Instead of holding mock debates as preparation, Trump has been hosting Sunday lunches with some of his advisers, the Washington Post reported.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/clinton-art-deal-writer-trump-debate

i am not counting on Clinton's debate prep to win her the debate, but the fact that she is so hard to rattle.

Trump is easily rattled. One jab and he'll be off on a rant.

this is where his lack of debate training will hurt him.

Trump's strong point with his followers is his ability to steamroll over anything that gets in his way. They don't really care if his policies make sense, are workable or are even downright hazardous to the United States. They just want him to sound tough. It's also that ability that is slowly starting to attract wavering independents to him and may well cost Clinton the election.

It won't be enough for her to be rational, to put forth good policies or to even show how ignorant Trump is of foreign and domestic affairs. He'll just shout his way over her. What she has to do is really trash him. To show she's as tough as he is. In other words, he's the bully that has to be beaten by a girl if she's going to get anything out of the debates other than talking head accolades.

her best move is to make Trump look like a petulant 4th grader.

This is a terrific read ~ and it fits snugly into Todd Gitlin's field of expertise ~ ~ and given the firestorm Matt Lauer created, people will be paying attention to how the moderators control the debates ~ there are "live links" to more/corroborating information in the original ~ Sooz

Why Trump presents a huge problem for presidential debate moderators
Todd Gitlin, Moyers & Company / 08 Sep 2016 at 19:16 ET


Chris Wallace wants be seen as a self-effacing fellow. “I see myself as a conduit,” he told Howard Kurtz, Rupert Murdoch’s idea of a house media critic.

Both men were celebrating Wallace being chosen as moderator of the third presidential debate on Oct. 19, the first time a Fox News figure has been picked to moderate a general election debate. Wallace was emphatic about his mission: “I do not believe that it’s my job to be a truth squad.” Kurtz, who winced visibly at the laughable thought that anyone could think that Fox News was a right-wing network, asked: “Does this help dispel that perception?” Wallace, no fool, pulled back from the invitation to read the minds of the audience, but crowed that he had been designated (along with the other moderators) by a “blue-ribbon” Commission on Presidential Debates headed by Democratic and Republican bigwigs, who, it’s fair to say, value the debates’ reputation for “nonpartisanship” more than their fidelity to truth.

Wallace was clear on what his task was not: “I do not believe that it’s my job to be a truth squad. It’s up to the other person to catch them on that” — i.e., to correct falsehoods. In his conception, a moderator is a talk-show or dinner-party host or a traffic cop who operates under Three Commandments.

Rule 1: Keep the conversation flowing. (“If one of them is filibustering, I’m going to try to break in respectfully and give the other person a chance to talk….[E]ngage the two [candidates] in conversation.”)

Rule 2: Be unobtrusive. (“I view it as kind of being a referee in a heavyweight championship fight. If it succeeds, when it’s over people will say, ‘You did a great job. I don’t even remember you on the stage.’”) If the candidate is down, make sure the opponent moves to a neutral corner. Of course, if I’m not mistaken, it’s also the referee’s job to call out punches beneath the belt, but never mind.

Rule 3 might be especially interesting: “Ask smart questions.” But what’s the test of smartness? Is it enough to ask a question that ranks A on the great report card in the sky? In the end, is it such a smart question if a candidate succeeds in dodging it or dissembling? In that case, doesn’t a smart question demand one or more smart follow-up questions? Doesn’t a certain kind of smart question invite the candidates to reveal something of their ideas about government, their commitments, values, knowledge and moral seriousness? Isn’t another kind of smart question one that demands of the candidates a grown-up recognition that all policies produce both winners and losers?

We’ll see how well Wallace does.

The chief criterion for a good debate is not simply whether it flows or whether it appears “fair and balanced.” That criterion must be whether it illuminates what is at stake in the election; how the candidates approach issues; how they arrive at judgments; and how they address conflict, which is, after all, the mother’s milk of politics. Toward the goal of helping viewers and listeners evaluate the abilities of the candidates, one principle should be simple: It’s better for the moderator to dispute one false claim than none; better two than one; better three than two.

To be fair and balanced, the problem is not solely Chris Wallace’s idea about moderator decorum. The “blue-ribbon” Commission on Public Debates shares the blame. Here is their announced job description:


They all have that noncontroversial ring, or thud, familiar to viewers of TV news, but the third is the worthiest of attention. What does it mean to “focus maximum time and attention on the candidates and their views”? If the moderator nods as the candidate distorts the truth, this does not qualify as attention worth paying attention to. This qualifies as a certificate of successful evasion. Suppose the candidate issues two falsehoods, and her opponent corrects only one. Wouldn’t the audience benefit from a correction of the other?

If the moderator lets falsehoods go undisputed — say, how much violent crime is committed by immigrants, and whether a budget deficit is dangerous — said moderator has not in fact demonstrated “familiarity with the candidates and the major issues of the presidential campaign.” If the candidates share a consensus on what is in fact a highly disputable claim — say, that bad trade deals are major reasons for job shrinkage and low wages — then the moderator has left intact a debatable proposition and no one is left the wiser. Unlike the referee, the moderator has a responsibility to the audience. It’s them, ourselves, the citizens, not the knockout king, that’s either the winner or the loser.

If a candidate evades a question and the opponent wants to make a point of her own, is it not a public service for the moderator to say, “You didn’t answer the question”? To return to Wallace’s metaphor, if the boxer comes out of his corner with his glove dripping with some unknown substance, is it not the job of the referee to interfere?

When one of the debaters is Donald Trump, let us grant that the moderator is faced with a practical problem. In the case of Trump, Politifact judged that, in sum, for 2015-16, if we look at all of Donald Trump’s statements of fact, 4 percent were true, 11 percent mostly true, 15 percent half-true, 17 percent mostly false, 35 percent false and 18 percent “pants on fire.” On one occasion in March, The Huffington Post had reporters examine the transcript of a Trump town hall the night before. They found “71 separate instances in which Trump made a claim that was inaccurate, misleading or deeply questionable” — more than one a minute. At that pace, Trump’s tropism toward untruth poses a serious challenge to any moderator — or opponent or fact-checker, for that matter — especially when everyone is limited to short statements. It is not too much to ask all the moderators — Lester Holt, Elaine Quijano (for Tim Kaine and Mike Pence), Martha Raddatz and Anderson Cooper, as well as Chris Wallace — to expose blatant untruths and correct the most egregious ones.

Over the course of the same period, Politifact claims a grand total 15 falsehoods committed by Hillary Clinton. Others may count differently, but the reader might survey Politifact’s list and see if they rise to the gravity of the Trump list. My judgment is that they do not, that most of Clinton’s falsehoods are errors of hype rather than errors of rank ignorance and deception. If the moderators have a different view, fine, let them demonstrate her errors as well. But do not let Trump’s sheer gushing bounty of lies, half-truths and quarter-truths become an excuse for letting him flow on uninterrupted to muddy the republic.

Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph.D. program in communications at Columbia University. ...

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/09/why-trump-presents-a-huge-problem-for-presidential-debate-moderators/

DT is just practicing his fancy footwork here, but he is exposing his own paranoia and fantasies ~ ~ not only are moderators required, they should be doing real-time fact-checking too ~ Sooz

Monday, Sep 12, 2016 08:29 AM CST
Trump complains the debates will be “rigged,” suggests scrapping moderators
"Let Hillary and I sit there and just debate because I think the system is being rigged," Trump said on Monday. VIDEO
Sophia Tesfaye Follow

One week ago, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump told reporters that despite his history of media bashing, he “respects” the four moderators selected by the Commission on Presidential Debates. Today Trump is already complaining that the moderators will be “very unfair” because they will go “really hard” on him.

“So I think we should have a debate with no moderators,” Trump suggested on Monday, “just Hillary and I sitting there talking.”

Referring to himself in the third person, the GOP nominee told CNBC that the debate moderator is going to “try to be really hard on Trump just to show, you know, the establishment what he can do.”

During a phone interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Trump said, “As far as the debates are concerned, the system is being gamed because everybody said that I won the debate, you know, the so-called forum that your group put on,” referring to last week’s Commander-in-Chief Forum hosted by NBC’s Matt Lauer.

“But they all said I won and that Matt Lauer was easy on me. Well he wasn’t,” Trump continued. “He was — I thought he was very professional. I have to be honest. I think he’s been treated very unfairly, but they all said that I won, and what they’re doing is they’re gaming the system so that when I go into the debate, I’m gonna get — be treated very, very unfairly by the moderators.”

The Republican nominee complained that the Clinton campaign has made such a big deal out of Lauer’s performance that this will serve to pressure future moderators to unfairly grill Trump. He made a comparison to college basketball coach Bobby Knight’s interactions with referees to illustrate his point.

“Bobby would do numbers on the referee and toward the end of the game, they would just sort of, you know, very sub—maybe subconsciously, they’d give him the calls and, you know, he was a master at it,” Trump said. “Well, they’re doing the same thing now. They’re saying about how Matt Lauer was nice to Trump. He wasn’t nice to me. He was tough on me. He gave me tough [questions]. I answered them better than she did.”

Trump continued, “They’re gaming the system, and I think, maybe, we should have no moderator. Let Hillary and I sit there and just debate because I think the system is being rigged so it’s gonna be a very unfair debate. And I can see it happening right now because everyone’s saying that he was soft on Trump.”

Added Trump: “Well now the new person’s gonna try to be really hard on Trump just to show, you know, the establishment what he can do. So I think it’s very unfair what they’re doing. So I think we should have a debate with no moderators — just Hillary and I sitting there talking.”

Recall that Trump boycotted a primary debate on Fox News after it turned to host Megyn Kelly, a chief media nemesis, to moderate, following his sustained attacks against her.

Watch Trump’s remarks, beginning at 30:00, below:


Salon

Anderson Cooper is one of the better political analysts today ~ he is rigorous in his questioning, but that's his MO with everyone ~ the "Editor's Note" below is boilerplate that closes all of HuffPo's political posts ~ both the article itself and the "Editor's Note" have "live links" to more/corroborating information in the original ~ Sooz

Donald Trump Doesn’t Like How Debate Moderator Anderson Cooper ‘Behaves’
Claims CNN host shouldn’t be allowed to moderate debate.
09/15/2016 10:39 pm ET | Updated 28 minutes ago
Ed Mazza

Donald Trump has promised to take part in all three scheduled debates, but he’s already complaining about at least one of the moderators.

In a Washington Post interview published Thursday evening, Trump described CNN’s Anderson Cooper as “very biased” and said he shouldn’t be allowed to moderate a debate.

“I don’t think Anderson Cooper should be a moderator because Anderson Cooper works for CNN and over the last couple of days, I’ve seen how Anderson Cooper behaves,” Trump said.

Despite his unhappiness with the moderator situation, the Republican presidential candidate still plans to attend the debate.


Cooper will co-moderate the second debate, scheduled for Oct. 9, with ABC’s Martha Raddatz.

If history is any indication, Cooper is likely to be tough on both candidates.

On Monday, he took Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton to task for not coming clean about her pneumonia diagnosis sooner. And last year, the CNN host made headlines for being tough on her at a Democratic debate.

At one point, he confronted Clinton on her history of changing positions on key issues, asking: “Will you say anything to get elected?”

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-anderson-cooper-behave_us_57db4af0e4b0071a6e0662e4?section=&

i am still not sure the debates are happening. is anyone else?

Good analysis of BOTH candidates ~ ~ Sooz

GOP policy expert predicts debate failure for Trump: ‘He can’t fake his way through 90 minutes’
Travis Gettys / 20 Sep 2016 at 09:08 ET

A Republican Party policy guru predicts the upcoming presidential debate won’t go well for Donald Trump, who’s already complaining that he won’t get a fair shot.

Hillary Clinton has scaled back her campaign schedule this week to prepare for Monday’s debate against her Republican rival, while Trump asks his supporters what he should say and “works the refs” by claiming the debates are “rigged” against him.

But, according to CNN contributor and Hoover Institution research fellow Lanhee Chen, the real estate developer and former reality TV star won’t be able to wing it in this debate like he did during the GOP primaries.

“He can’t fake his way through 90 minutes,” said Chen, in an appearance on CNN’s “Party People” podcast with Kevin Madden and Mary Katherine Ham.

Chen, who worked on the presidential campaigns for Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, said voters in the general election expect to hear more substance than GOP primary voters.

“The 90-minute general election format makes it a lot harder to one line your way through it,” Chen said. “I think it’s going to be very, very hard for Donald Trump to spend 90 minutes bumper-stickering. I think he’s got to have something.”

Clinton faces her own challenge in exposing Trump’s weaknesses without annoying voters, Chen said.

“I think for Hillary Clinton the challenge is: How does she expose the deficiencies in what he said or proposed without sounding pedantic?” Chen said. “She’s going to sound like the teacher that nobody likes, and nobody wants to hear the teacher they don’t like lecturing them for 90 minutes.”

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/09/gop-policy-expert-predicts-debate-failure-for-trump-he-cant-fake-his-way-through-90-minutes/

Chen, who worked on the presidential campaigns for Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, said voters in the general election expect to hear more substance than GOP primary voters.

“The 90-minute general election format makes it a lot harder to one line your way through it,” Chen said. “I think it’s going to be very, very hard for Donald Trump to spend 90 minutes bumper-stickering. I think he’s got to have something.”

He blustered, bluffed and bamboozled his way through umpteen primary debates and came out on top. He's done the same thing through the campaign and he's leading in the polls. Why would he fix what works? All he has to do is grump, growl, insult refugees and Muslims and holler "deplorables", "e-mails" or "Benghazi" every thirty seconds or so and he'll come out way on top.

jim, what you're not factoring in and what is exceptionally important is that what plays well with primary voters does NOT work with general election voters ~ general election voters demand more substance than the demeaning and shocking off-the-cuff remarks DT spews "for effect" ... that he virtually always tries to walk back hours after spewing ~

And FTR, Hillary has been slowly recouping her lead over DT following her pneumonia diagnosis and her "deplorables" mini-outrage ~ the most recent NBC poll has Hillary up +5% over DT ~

Maybe it's just me, but I still believe/fervantly hope Hillary will win ~ the BIG question is by how much ~

Sooz

*** Edited for clarity.

just FYI, the predicted results based on historical norms are Trump +4 to Clinton +8.

what this means is that it COULD be a big win for Clinton (ala 2008) but it is unlikely a big win for Trump.

NOTE: this is all based on averages. there is a lot of uncertainty on those limits, as well.

Clinton is a 3:2 favorite to win as of this morning, but it is very close.

I haven't decided if I'm going to watch the 1st debate Monday night ~ I do plan on TRYING to watch it ... but DT's voice and his phony/smug grin make me nauseous [literally] ~ ~ there are a few "live links" to more/corroborating information in the original ~ Sooz

The debates leading up to the debates
09/23/16 01:02 PM
By Steve Benen

The first presidential debate featuring Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is scheduled for Monday night, which means assorted partisans are hard at work, furiously trying to shape public perceptions ahead of the big showdown.

There are three broad angles to this that are worth keeping in mind between now and showtime.

1. Donald Trump is terrified of real-time fact-checking.

Republicans are still angry with CNN’s Candy Crowley fact-checking Mitt Romney during a debate four years ago, and Donald Trump spent some time this week lobbying NBC News’ Lester Holt, among other moderators, to let the candidates argue among themselves.

“You’re debating somebody, and if she makes a mistake, or if I make a mistake, we’ll take each other on,” Trump said during one of his several Fox News appearances this week. He added that he and Clinton should simply “argue it out.”

It’s bound to be tricky. If a moderator, such as Crowley, provides the public with information that contradicts a candidate, he or she is the target of intense criticism. Note, however, that NBC News’ Matt Lauer also faced equally intense rebukes recently for hosting an event in which he let some brazen Donald Trump lies go without pushback.

Trump clearly prefers the latter, creating a “he said, she said” dynamic in which viewers aren’t sure who to believe. Whether Holt and other moderators stick to that model remains to be seen.

2. The expectations game is getting ridiculous.

I wrote a piece a few weeks ago about the campaigns going to borderline silly lengths to set expectations ahead of the debate – “Our candidate is going to do terribly, and our rival will be amazing” – and the problem has only intensified. The New York Times reported today:


The Associated Press has a similar report today. Take both with many grains of salt.

Look, this isn’t complicated: it’s in the Trump campaign’s interests to tell reporters that Trump isn’t going to be well prepared, hasn’t taken coaching seriously, and isn’t approaching the process with any real seriousness. That doesn’t mean it’s true.

We already know the Republican nominee has had training sessions with aides – including, by some accounts, former Fox chief Roger Ailes, who knows a thing or two about effective television – and to buy the spin that Trump aides are deeply concerned is to ignore the larger game that’s being played.

3. The media is already setting the bar too low for Trump.

Donald Trump has certainly earned his reputation for offensive antics and routine buffoonery, but this has created a dynamic in which the media will declare him the winner if he manages to go the entire debate without mooning Clinton and the audience.

Fox’s Charles Krauthammer recently said that if Trump “just shows up not foaming at the mouth … he wins automatically.”

The problem, of course, is that it’s crazy to evaluate a presidential candidate on that kind of curve. Instead of holding Trump to a high standard – expecting him to be honest, well informed on a wide variety of issues, etc. – Americans are being told Trump “wins” if he avoids making racial slurs and drooling on himself.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent has some good advice for observers: “[T]hese ‘expectations’ are arbitrary, and they are set by the commentators themselves. Trump should not be accorded credit for being less ignorant, unhinged, hateful, and dishonest than usual.”

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/the-debates-leading-the-debates

Bipartisan Report is an enormous online newspaper that makes it onto my Facebook feed regularly ~ from what I've read, it really does appear to BE "bipartisan" ~ the DT threat against Lester Holt is proven in the below video ~ ~ there are a few "live links" to more/corroborating information in the original ~ Sooz

JUST IN: Donald Trump Issues INSANE Threat To Debate Moderators If They Fact-Check Him
By Carissa House-Dunphy / September 22, 2016

Lester Holt is set to moderate the first of three presidential debates this election season on Monday, September 26, and a certain GOP presidential nominee has already complained that Holt will be biased in favor of his opponent, insisting that Holt is a Democrat, even though he’s actually a registered Republican.

Trump also complained about the dates on the debate schedule, saying that they were unfair to him, specifically, because they conflicted with NFL football game times. He even told reporters that the NFL sent him a letter calling the scheduling “ridiculous,” but the NFL was quick to call Trump on his lie.

This week, Trump came up with an all new complaint. One candidate’s campaign is calling for real time fact checks by the debate moderator and the other is against that idea, which is fairly telling. Clinton’s campaign would like a model like the one Candy Crowley used during the 2012 elections when, in a defining moment of the debate, she fact-checked Mitt Romney over a false claim about President Obama and the Republican candidate never quite recovered.

Donald Trump is furious. He’s so furious, in fact, that he’s threatening to sic his supporters on Holt if he calls Trump on his lies.

In an interview with Fox News today, Trump said he would have people “watching” to see if Lester Holt “succumbs to the pressure” to fact-check him. In other words, if Holt doesn’t allow Trump to argue using lies, biased sources, and unsourced facts, his supporters will protest.

He’s furious over this with good reason. Trump has, so far, been allowed to lie during town halls and primary debates with no immediate need to clarify or defend his ridiculously false statements. He was allowed to lie in a town hall with Matt Lauer when he said he had been against the Iraq War from the beginning, although video evidence is readily available that proves that to be untrue. He was also allowed to cite inaccurate statistics to Marine veteran Rachael Fredricks about the rate of veteran suicides, while she could only shake her head at his audacity.

Had Trump been fact-checked by Lauer either time, his rants on Twitter and in press conferences about Lauer’s bias toward Democrats and the unfair treatment of truth-tellers in the liberal media would have been endless.

In Wizard of Oz style, Trump is doing his best to convince his supporters to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” If he can play to their paranoia about the liberal media and biased reporters ahead of time, he’ll give them something to use to insist that he won a debate in which Hillary Clinton mopped the floor with him.

[Video accessible via the end link.]

http://bipartisanreport.com/2016/09/22/just-in-donald-trump-issues-insane-threat-to-debate-moderators-if-they-fact-check-him/

Fact check Trump and challenge him with those facts. In fact, fact check both of them.

Agreed, oskar ~ BOTH should be fact-checked in real time ~ and if a moderator is not sure of what is true/false/exaggeration, s/he should check the minute s/he gets off-air and publicly report her/his findings ~ all candidates' feet need to be held to the fire ALONG WITH all media feet ~

Sooz

We're talking US media personalities here, Sooz. You still have those flashbacks what the media once was?

Good point, jab ~ yes, it's a benefit [or curse] of aging ~

Sooz

It's to the point where the National Enquirer is the go to media for accuracy.

Josh Marshall's astute take on Monday's debate ~ we'll see ~ Sooz

TPM EDBLOG
A Few Thoughts on the Debate
By Josh Marshall Published September 24, 2016, 4:31 PM EDT

Most of the commentary I've seen about Monday night's debate focuses on whether Trump will show up hot and angry or be a suddenly polished and articulate Donald Trump we've never seen before. There's also a feverish debate over expectations which posits that if Trump doesn't kill anyone or find some new extremely sympathetic person to make racist comments about that he'll win - judged against extremely low expectations. Neither of these ring true to what I've seen from the two candidates over the last 18 months or what I glean from the state of the race.

For starters, Trump definitely said some crazy things in the numerous Republican debates. But fairly few of the really damaging things he said in this campaign were in the debates. They tended to be at rallies or in interviews. Put simply, Trump wasn't as crazy or unhinged in debates as people seem to remember. So if we're expecting him to come in trash talking and angry I think we may be surprised, at least at first.

For Trump, the bigger problem in a debate setting is the nature of two person debates versus as many as ten on the stage at once. Answers in multi-person debates tend to be short and pointed. Time is in very short supply. Generally you have to fight to get in on a question. There can be back and forth and candidates are sometimes pressed on a given point. But that isn't the norm. Time is scarce and you can generally just hang back on a question you don't want to address.

Two person debates have very different dynamics. I think the bigger liability for Trump is what we saw in the national security forum hosted a few weeks ago by NBC News.

Here's one passage about his secret plan to defeat ISIS ...


Here Trump has very little idea what he's talking about and when pressed on a clear contradiction he starts making up new nonsense to avoid addressing the question. As I said at the time: I think this exchange is pretty obvious for people in a way that transcends politics and ideology. Trump is the kid telling the teacher the dog ate his homework. Then the teacher points out he has no dog. But he's not going to apologize or come clean. He's just going to keep talking.

Trump is extremely ignorant when it comes to public policy. George W. Bush had a pretty limited handle on public policy issues too. But either he or his campaign staff (likely both) had some awareness of this fact and kept his answers general and brief. Trump has no such self-awareness and generally just makes things up on the fly. That's seldom gone over well in non-Fox contexts - not just because he's ignorant but because it's usually pretty obvious he's just making things up.

I do think it's possible he'll be goaded into saying something offensive or unhinged. For instance, I think it would be highly advisable for Clinton to confront Trump on birtherism - to press the point that he needs to provide some explanation and apology for why he spread this lie for six years. He's shown very little indication that he has a good answer to that question. Questions like that, shaming questions, tend to set him off.

Rather than a tirade, the much greater danger for Trump is just the need to explain his policies in anything more than 5 or ten second snippets. This liability was very clear in the National Security Forum.

Clinton isn't a greater debater and she's not known as one. She's a competent debater who can discuss policy details at almost limitless length. We've seen Clinton in literally dozens of debates and townhalls. She won't make a big factual mistake or do something crazy. It's not in her character. She definitely won't snap under pressure. If she can deliver a strong performance which cuts against perceptions that she's dishonest or out of touch, she may start consolidating generally young NeverTrump voters currently supporting third party candidates. But she doesn't need to do that. She already has a small but seemingly durable lead. The danger she faces is getting hit on the Clinton Foundation or the emails story and responding in some lawyerly way which gets dissected and then triggers a bunch of new memes or is reasonable and complete and still gets dissected and triggers new memes.

In any case, this is my read on what to expect and the liabilities both candidates face. But I think it's important to see the whole question in a broader perspective. There is little history of presidential debates playing a clear role in deciding any recent presidential election. More importantly, Clinton has maintained a small but clear lead for months. Trump is the one who needs a game-changing encounter. We can remember the first debate in 2012. President Obama was widely perceived as dramatically underperforming expectations with an unfocused and meandering performance. Romney was aggressive and on-point. It was a shock to the race - judged by elite opinion and poll results. But the shock proved ephemeral.

The key in my mind is this: Trump is the one who needs a game-changing result. You generally do that by taking the initiative and being aggressive. But the biggest factor weighing down his numbers is the widespread belief that he is too emotionally unstable and simply lacks the temperament to be president. That means his ability to do himself any good by going off on Clinton or going after her is very limited.

The more plausible path for Trump is not to go for a knock-out blow but to be calm and measured, stand side by side with Clinton as a plausible chief executive and confound the perceptions that are holding him back. It's hard for me believe that this won't at some level be the plan. The challenge for Trump is twofold. First, it's difficult to really shake things up with what is by definition a low energy strategy. Second, Trump's inability to answer basic questions about his policy proposals will almost certainly bring out his aggressive and erratic side. At the end of the day it is quite difficult to be other than the people we are. Absent a teleprompter, Trump has shown no ability in eighteen months to be anybody but himself in public. These basic realities are key to bear in mind.

Having said all this, for someone who cares about the outcome in the race, a first presidential debate is always a tense, nail-biting affair. I doubt this will be any different. It is by definition a highly unpredictable, un-controlled setting. Very unpredictable things can happen. But these realities and benchmarks are important to keep in mind.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-few-thoughts-on-the-debate