October 22, 2020
Today had two important takeaways:
Intelligence officials warned today that Russia recently hacked into our local and state computer networks. This could compromise our voting infrastructure. Intelligence officials believe our adversaries will try to help Trump, possibly by casting doubt on the voting results. While the administration has tried to insist that Iran and China are as significant a threat, experts disagree. Yesterday, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe identified Iran as the originator of fake emails purporting to be the from the alt-right gang the Proud Boys warning Democrats to vote for Trump, but the information they used for the enterprise was all public. Russia, though, has hacked our private election systems, making officials worry that it could change or delete voter data, throwing people off the rolls or invalidating mail-in ballots.
Bottom line on tonight’s final presidential debate: Trump needed to move the needle in his direction. He didn’t. Biden needed not to lose voters. He didn’t. The debate will likely not change the trajectory of the election.
If you need a break after this week’s news hurricane, you can quit reading right here.
For those sticking around….
This was not a good day for the president’s reelection campaign. He seemed unable to get over how angry he was at Lesley Stahl from CBS’s 60 Minutes after yesterday’s interview for a special program Sunday evening, and ultimately decided to post on Facebook the video the White House took during it. Trump’s team had said they were recording “for archival purposes only,” and posting the video meant Trump violated his agreement with the network.
Trump seemed to think showing the clip would illustrate how poorly the media treats him, but in fact it shows Stahl behaving professionally, asking solid questions and fact-checking the president, while Trump argues and denigrates her. If the clip was supposed to generate sympathy for him, it backfired.
The debate did him no favors either. Debate moderator Kristen Welker of NBC News was far more effective at keeping control over the debate than the previous two moderators were, especially at first, when the two men appeared to be afraid of her cutting their mics. Trump could not contain himself for long, though, and slipped pretty quickly back into talking over Welker and Biden both. Still, he was far more restrained than he was at the first debate.
More significantly, he made little effort to use his time to connect with voters. He focused simply on badgering Biden and rehearsing the talking points that have become almost set pieces in his performances. They are not entirely comprehensible to someone who is not reading or watching right-wing media, but they are quite shockingly full of lies. And while his language is familiar to his usual audience, it is unlikely to attract new voters, who will likely be confused at best and, possibly, bored after hearing the same phrases for so long.
While Biden, too, strayed from the truth on occasion, CNN fact checker Daniel Dale put it this way: “For a fact checker, you’re kind of sitting there w/Biden. Occasionally you’re like oh that’s wrong. With Trump you’re like the ‘I Love Lucy’ episode in the chocolate factory. You don’t know which one to pick up because there’s just so much.” He noted, “From a lying perspective, Trump is even worse tonight than in the first debate.”
Trump did not make much of a case for his reelection tonight. He seemed to have no plans for what he would like to accomplish in a second term, although he did say he hoped to create a new healthcare plan (he has said repeatedly he already has one). He mocked Biden for talking about the so-called “kitchen table issues” that are important to ordinary voters, and insisted that Biden should have done everything he talks about accomplishing in the future back when he was vice president under President Barack Obama. At one point, Trump talked about what he would do “when I become president.”
For his part, Biden largely ignored Trump’s wild answers and tried to outline his policies, which he described with more detail than clarity, but which were interesting nonetheless because they offered something new when compared with Trump’s rote performance, worn thin by familiarity. Biden had no major slips. Trump pounced on Biden’s declaration that the nation must transition away from oil, instantly responding, “Will you remember that Texas, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Ohio?” But Pennsylvania and Ohio produce just a tiny bit of crude oil—they are both primarily natural gas states—and Trump's identification of Texas and Oklahoma was a self-own. He is worried about carrying Texas and Oklahoma?
Most telling was that Trump was unprepared for Welker’s final, excellent but softball question: if they were to be elected, what would they say on Inauguration Day to voters who did not support them. Trump claimed that rebuilding the economy “to make our country totally successful as it was prior to the plague coming over from China” would bring Americans together, and then pivoted to attacking Biden, warning that if he were elected, “you will have a depression the likes of which you’ve never seen.”
Biden, though, recognized that Welker had deliberately lobbed them the opportunity to make a final pitch to voters. He promised to represent all voters, not just those who voted for him, and promised to put “science over fiction” and “hope over fear.” “We’re going to choose to move forward because we have enormous opportunities, enormous opportunities to make things better,” he said. “We can grow this economy, we can deal with the systemic racism, and at the same time we can make sure that our economy is being run and moved and motivated by clean energy creating millions of new jobs. That’s the fact.”
On the ballot this year, he said, are “Decency, honor, respect, treating people with dignity, making sure that everyone has an even chance, and I'm going to make sure you get that.”
Instant polls gave the debate to Biden by the same margins showing in the polls in general. CNN had Biden at 53% and Trump at 39%; Data Progress had Biden at 52% and Trump at 41%; US Politics had Biden at 52% and Trump at 39%.
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/us/politics/russia-election-interference-hacks.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2020/10/22/trump-60-minutes-breaks-agreement-cbs-stahl/
https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=OH
https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/presidential-debate-trump-biden-2020-10-22/
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/22/politics/fact-check-final-presidential-election-debate/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/10/22/us/fact-check-debate-trump-biden
"When I become president." Old Blubberbrain's still permanently stuck in 2016 and is convinced he's running against HRC. And of course, the closest he's gotten to "president" in the past four years is taking up space in the White House, which isn't exactly the same thing.
We need to stop thinking of Trump as a liar. He's a bullshitter. Professor Harry Frankfurt explained the difference between lying and bullshitting in his essay and later book, "On Bullshit," which is a very good read.
“When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.”
"Unlike the liar who promulgates a falsehood, the bullshitter does not want to deceive anyone about the facts, although it is produced without concern for the truth, it need not be false. He does not care one way or another. What he cares about is what people think about him.”
I think we can see from this that Trump is, indeed, a bullshitter.
I confess, I couldn't make it through the whole debate. I read some of the mainstream columnists' take-aways this morning and it made me wonder if some of them watched the same thing I did? Mark Thiesen, Washington Post, and I'm guessing other 'conservative' columnists, think Trump laid Biden out. Really???
It's the same in the area I live in. When I hear the locals make remarks about Trump's wonderfulness, his care for their issues (?), I know they've swallowed the whole Fox/NRA/Alex Jones #$#sandwich.
The town I early voted in made the Washington Post this week for some protestors' less than civil behavior. I was surprised it wasn't worse. I still expect to see the 3%ers and the Oath Keepers and the like show up on Nov. 3rd with their AR15s, even if they stand stone silent as close to the entrance to the polls as they can legally get. But I also won't be surprised if they drive through the parking lots, loud speakers blaring Trump praise, loud enough to wake the dead, Trump flags waving, etc.
But even if they push the boundaries and overstep, it won't do any good to 'call law enforcement', because around here, the sheriff's dept. is all in for Trump. The sheriff was heard at a public meeting talking about their plans for when the left-wing anarchists show up at the polls and how they were ready for them.
A friend had the best comeback to a Trumpster I've heard yet. He was regaling her about how Biden would ruin people like him with huge tax increases and she told him we all have to 'vote our own self interest; that his was obviously different from hers, because she didn't make over $400k a year, as he obviously must, if he's worried about his taxes going up.
The same argument can be used for those who rail against the 'death tax". Just smile sweetly and say, "I had no idea you were worth over $10 million! (Or whatever the current cap is). Of course, these are always people who make maybe $30,000/year and have no clue how the tax works.