Commentary

JOHN BRUMMETT: Years in the making

Once I had the rare opportunity to watch a presidential debate in the company of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

It was 1980 and I was a cub reporter traveling with Bill's doomed gubernatorial re-election campaign, covering it for the former Arkansas Gazette.

The schedule put us overnight in Fort Smith, where Bill was trying to control damage from Cuban refugee rioting nearby.

I found myself in the home of Clinton supporter Nancy Hernreich, where Bill and Hillary camped to watch then-President Jimmy Carter fail abysmally in his lone debate with actor Ronald Reagan.

As Carter obsessed on the nuclear threat and quoted his daughter Amy's worries about an apocalypse, and as Reagan asked if you were better off today than you had been four years before, and as Bill hung his head, a frustrated Hillary berated Carter's pollster-consultant, Patrick Caddell.

Hillary knew, and said vigorously throughout the debate, that Carter's Caddell-designed strategy to go soft and sweet against the implied threat of Reagan was a loser--that the way to go after Reagan was to go after Reagan, explicitly, taking no prisoners, not subtly with and like a little girl.

It was my first exposure to Hillary Clinton, then Hillary Rodham, and it quickly became clear to me that she was the intense combatant in the family.

I thought about that Monday night as Hillary debated the deeply devolved modern version of Reagan, Donald Trump.

I should have known that she would be no Jimmy Carter, but the antithesis--a battler properly and fully prepared to execute competently the right strategy. She'd known for at least 36 years how not to handle the assignment before her.

She smiled, appeared calm, baited the temperamentally unsound megalomaniac, then essentially invited her blustery foe to twist himself on the knife she had inserted in his back.

He obliged by twisting. And twisting.

Trump left no bait unconsumed. He sniffed, squirmed, scowled, scoffed, gyrated, huffed, puffed and interrupted. I could sense women nationwide coalescing for her as he talked over her and tried to bully her while she maintained a practiced aura of forbearance that actually was the smug thrill of success.

He so ripped himself apart on her knife that he was left to spend the last 20 minutes or so resembling the Hogs' fourth-quarter defense against Texas A&M.

Clinton's rout of Trump tied for the all-time soundest shellacking in a presidential debate. It was more pronounced than Kennedy's win over Nixon. It was matched only by the beat-down Hillary had shouted at through a Fort Smith television screen 36 years before.

Some people asked afterward the oft-bogus either-or question: Did Hillary destroy Trump or did Trump destroy himself?

As is frequently the case, the answer was yes.

Trump had one overriding political need entering Monday night. It was to appeal to certain usual Republican voters--college-educated and white and suburban and female--who had supported John McCain and Mitt Romney but couldn't as yet bring themselves to accept that Trump, by temperament and knowledge, was a serious or safe presidential prospect.

Thus Trump had one task. It was to normalize himself. It was to behave for 90 minutes. It was to demonstrate sufficient taste, decorum and policy command--only a modicum of the latter, really--that these GOP-inclined voters could actually begin to see him as president.

It was to give these voters the least excuse to return to the Republican fold. They didn't want to have to vote for Clinton.

So Trump proceeded to let them down, presumably because he couldn't help himself.

He showcased, rather than veiled, every nonpresidential aspect of his character and style. He clearly hadn't studied, practiced or otherwise prepared. He lacked the discipline to adhere to a plan. He demonstrated none of the ego control necessary to let her goading of him roll off his back.

He said it was smart for him not to pay taxes and good business for him to root for Americans to lose their homes.

Wary Republicans who tuned in hoping to warm to him probably found themselves actually warming to her.

Trump was no Reagan. He was Nixon sweating and Palin jabbering and Ford liberating Poland and Gore sighing and George H.W. Bush checking his watch. He was all of that put together in his own inimitably offensive way.

And Hillary was no Carter. But she wasn't Bill, either, because she lacked the charm; or Barack, because she lacked the eloquence, or JFK, because she lacked the panache and sophistication.

She was Hillary, tough and smart and disciplined and driven, and more likely after Monday night than before to be the first woman president.

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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 09/29/2016

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