Facts and the candidates

Donald Trump said last week that he didn't want any on-the-spot fact-checking--meaning correction of his misstatements--on Monday night from debate moderator Lester Holt.

That came shortly after Trump had said Holt was a Democrat, which--you guessed it--was inaccurate.

Holt, a record check showed, has been registered in New York as a Republican since 2003.


What's inappropriate, other than that Trump regularly says things that aren't factual, is that a network news anchor is affiliated with partisan labeling at all.

A network news anchor ought to make a public presentation of transcendent independence even if, truth be known, he's as full of it as Brian Williams or as liberal as Walter Cronkite.

Meantime, the pre-debate debate last week had the Hillary Clinton campaign counter-arguing that Holt and the moderators of subsequent debates owed a duty to the voting public to call out Trump's false statements.

In basketball coaching, they call what the campaigns were doing "working the officials." You whine now to try to get a call later.

All last week, the question I heard most--and it came from Clinton supporters--was whether Holt would cite Trump for inaccuracy. These Clinton supporters fervently argue that fair debate commands that the moderator indeed identify misstatements.

The Clinton campaign is reeling from the general false equivalency of charges against the candidates. It's a dynamic by which an incessant pattern of Trump misstatement and Clinton campaign correction is dismissed as the usual back-and-forth of dreaded politics as usual.

Clinton people are especially outraged that, in the "commander-in-chief forum" a few days ago, Holt's colleague at NBC, Matt Lauer, let Trump get away with saying he had opposed the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq all along. In fact, Trump had told radio shock jock Howard Stern at the time that he guessed he supported the war.

What was especially egregious was that Trump and Clinton did not appear together and Clinton got entirely separate questions.

It will be different Monday night. If Trump says something unsupported by the record, indeed contradicted by it--and there's scant chance that won't happen--then the responsibility of correcting him will belong to the would-be president standing next to him and offering the nation an alternative to him.

Candy Crowley of CNN took President Barack Obama's side over Mitt Romney in a fact dispute four years ago. All that did was galvanize those convinced that the media are biased in favor of liberals.

The format and dynamic Monday should be as follows: Holt asks Trump a question. Trump responds by saying something inaccurate, and does so with an expectation of getting away with it as usual. Holt stays out of it, because he's not a debater. He asks for Clinton's response. She's the debater. And she declares inaccurate whatever Trump has just said. She makes her case in support of her charge.

If she lacks the credibility, command and persuasiveness to convince a decisive number of listeners that Trump has spoken inaccurately, then that is her failing, indeed a woeful one for one presuming to lead the United States.

If she rebuts effectively, but listeners won't accept her rebuttal, then that is the listeners' failing. They may well end up with the president they deserve.

You can lead a voter to fact, but you cannot make him learn.

The heck of it is that Trump's supporters don't much act from fact, but anger. Fact-checking against him tends to get dismissed by his supporters as the usual claptrap of the self-perpetuating elite establishment.

The stakes are enormous Monday night. Early voting makes the first debate the biggest and most determinative. And the race could still go either way.

Trump's job is to appear normal, not a madman, and give undecided moderate voters a sense that maybe he actually could be a competent president.

The format of six 15-minute segments on six predetermined topics ought to facilitate easy scripting for Trump, provided he is tamable.

Hillary's job is to remind voters that Trump is a wild man, but to do so without appearing mean or angry, as she has a tendency to appear.

It also wouldn't hurt Clinton if she could fashion a simple positive message for her campaign.

Trump has one, such as it is, which is to make American great again.

Hillary's only message so far has been that she wants to be president, darnit, and has had to wait too blankety-blank long already, and that surely to high heaven she's not going to lose it now to this clown.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 09/25/2016

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