As dust settles on the Trump-Clinton debate, a sorry spectacle is emerging. A sorry spectacle of intellectual and ethical abandonment of the Republican Party’s Conservative principles, including those of Tea Party radicals and evangelicals.
Donald Trump demonstrated again that he is not a disruptive fire brand reforming Republican Conservative values or ratifying Christian integrity. He is an evasive populist the entirety of whose ideas fail to go beyond self-serving grandiloquence.
Just weeks before the presidential poll, his performance placed the final seal on the Republican Party’s sad inadequacy as an American thought leader. Much less of the allies and democracies upon which America’s global prosperity, regard and leadership rests.
The Republican Party’s debacle is indeed a joyless spectacle. Its establishment hates Hillary Clinton more than it is discomfited by Trump.
Bizarrely, it prefers to subject Americans and their friends around the world to at least four years of Trump’s inchoate hubris than accept another term with an experienced Democrat at the top.
In effect, it is merely bowing to the huge chunk of American voters enthralled by Trump’s shortcuts to a paradise puffed with America’s Greatness. A greatness where middle class white men, with a smattering of tanned ones, will lounge in gardens decked with fawning women.
The fault for Trump’s trumped-up preening lies with his gullible vote-banks. He is as surprised by his triumphs as his opponents.
But it also lies with the devious ambition and shortsightedness of Republican Party grandees.
They are knowingly sacrificing democracy to a braggart who barely knows the state of his own businesses and taxes. And certainly does not recognize the responsibilities towards community and nation that they entail.
In the hands of such a temperament, Republic Party leaders are readying to place the grave responsibilities of American renewal, including global leadership and uplifting the world’s less-favored.
To Trump, making America great again means raising the drawbridges around Chateau United States. He swims in delusions that economic and military autonomy is attainable in our digitally-networked twenty-first century.
Naively, he thinks he can win respect around the world for Americans even if a Trump administration coerces others to pay for the privilege of supporting US foreign policy goals, being on the front line of wars, enriching US shareholders through trade and sacrificing the needs of their own workers to increase well-paid jobs for Americans.
That said, it must be recognized that Trump is a dreamer gushing his own concepts and vision. At the least, he has chutzpah.
In contrast, debater Hillary Clinton was masterful but somewhat mind-numbing. Unlike Barack Obama and certainly unlike Bill Clinton, she did not exude the stuff that sets hearts on wings.
She is a Democratic Party thoroughbred and a swot with extraordinary debating skills. The Oxford Union would swell with pride, had she been one of theirs.
She’d be wonderful as US President, particularly as compared to Trump. But her presence though interesting was uninspiring.
She seemed to lack the gut of a leader capable of uniting Americans.
Nor does she seem to have the charisma, despite her wide experience, capable of rallying fretful disparate nations to the flag of values dear to the US Constitution -– and essential to underpin US global leadership.
Without that leadership, bases for the American people’s prosperity will remain unstable in the emerging global order, which is challenging the US-led post World War II order.
However, she did trigger a wave of relief among America’s many European and Asian friends at her besting of Trump at the Hofstra lectern.
Thankfully, she seems all set to be President despite the quasi-religious fervor of Trump’s supporters.
Unless of course, drafts of misfortune sweep over the US on November 8 and the undecided and new voters she most needs fail to turn out in large enough numbers.
Prudently, many Europeans and Asians are keeping their fingers crossed for her, unlike nationalists in Russia, China and North Korea.
For many, raising Clinton’s glove in victory after the Hofstra pugilism is a tricky call. Trump voters may simply dismiss that as wishful thinking by eggheads over-selling a like-minded white knight, who remains opaque and shifty.
In any other age, when the Republican candidate was indeed a Republican, the points scored by Clinton’s many punches would clearly call it for her.
But we are in 2016 America where voters no longer seem to know what they desire from their democracy.
Perhaps, both Republican Party values and US democracy are approaching exhaustion after centuries of tussle.
Still, my heart be still! The electoral college might still achieve what Democratic vote banks and the fence-sitters are too jaded to work for.
Entreat, my heart, entreat that many are not so disheartened by her lack of elevating passion that they decide to stay at home.
Debates moderated on television and watched by 84 million people are not really debates. Two minutes are far from enough to communicate anything well-reasoned or convincing to such a mish-mash of viewers.
But the format is good enough to score points with one-liners of varying accuracy designed to project the talker as a leader more alpha than the opponent.
Here, Clinton seemed more masterly. But she didn’t score a knock out.
Often, in a debate, the durable effect on voters is ethos – a sense of who the debaters are.
She did emerge as warmer than her usual entitled persona that brooks few fools.
Trump came across as a muddler who brooks no dissent about his extravagant self-regard. But that may not harm him.
For those less schooled in the minutiae that thrill American analysts, Trump’s occasional tongue-tied pique seemed to reveal him as more transparent and artlessly human.
His words continued to unveil him as scarier than surmised. But she remained plastic and too well-rehearsed a professional politician to be trusted.
Yet, let’s hope intensely for that turn out in her favor.