HEMPSTEAD, NY—Never fear. This is not costing me or the Beacon $200. My notes are in a small Mead composition pad. My iPhone is dead. The shabby-looking Dunkin’ Donuts appears to be closed, but its Wi-Fi is still operational in the parking lot. They must have forgotten to turn it off, which means that I should be able to file. For a day that began with the starter going out on our family’s 2003 Chevy Tracker and a nearly missed train, things are looking up.
In Hempstead, all the animals come out at night, including pink unicorns, like the one that Vermin Supreme is probably still parading on top of his head up and down California Avenue. Students from Hofstra and nearby Adelphi were having a good time. I asked one—a few weeks too late with his seersucker suit and bowtie—drinking Bud Light on the street whether he was a Hillary man.
"Hell, no. Can’t wait to watch Trump f— her up."
He had to wait until just past 9:00. The debate started three minutes late on, I think inevitably, an anti-climactic note. Man in bland presidential blue wearing flag pin shook hands with woman in red pantsuit.
"How are you, Donald?"
I could not hear what Trump said. I had almost hoped that he would kiss her. It’s important to remember that these people, not only Donald and Hillary but Bill and Melania and the Kushners, have met each other before. The nervous aura of anticipation that has been surrounding this thing for a few weeks is hard to make sense of.
Clinton started with talking points and a faux-cozy anecdote. She talked up small business, mentioned green jobs, and said nothing at all about income inequality, the subject of Holt’s question.
Trump looked bored and impatient throughout her opening remarks. In his serious mode, at least when he’s off the teleprompter, he is as tedious as she is. A born actor, he can read a script about foreign policy as well as anybody. But his improvisational ability is limited when he’s been told that he cannot insult someone’s looks or impugn her masculinity.
What about gaffes? Trump couldn’t remember the name of Solyndra and seemed to suggest that Clinton is the owner of a time machine that she uses to wage war against the Islamic State. Clinton showed us that she doesn’t know what the word "precipice" means, but otherwise her points about Trump’s current tax plan were made effectively. He sounded boring, flustered, eager to get his points out there. Both of them at different times reminded me of another 2016 presidential candidate: Trump’s former primary opponent Jeb Bush. When he told Clinton, "I want you to be very happy, it’s very important to me," he sounded whiny and passive-aggressive. He barely got a word in about her emails. Meanwhile, Clinton continually referred the audience to her website and even her book the way Bush used to in New Hampshire, touting his online 500-point plan and that black book about immigration that no one remembers.
Trump was at his best talking about NAFTA. Her response was to pretend that one of her husband’s signature economic achievements had been a failure. Anyone with a cruel streak must have enjoyed seeing him put her in a kangaroo corner over Obama’s support of TPP. Otherwise, though, when it came to economic issues he allowed her to paint him as a generic Republican caricature.
The most coherent exchange all night was on crime, which isn’t saying much. Clinton was vague and noncommittal; Trump was Nixonian, though for a moment I thought he was going to say "because Black Lives Matter." I don’t know how Clinton reconciles her claim that Trump was painting too "dire" a picture of African-American life with the very grim statistics about incarceration she quoted only 30 seconds later. When she said "it has worked," did she mean stop and frisk?
The last 30 or so minutes were given over to foreign policy. Clinton spoke about cyber security with the boring cogency of a master’s degree student at George Washington University. Trump bragged about his endorsements and his son’s computer skills and tried to reach out to Sanders supporters one last time, ineffectively, I think, by bringing up the hacking of the DNC server.
Lester Holt was tedious on the few occasions he bothered to speak up. What did he think he was going to accomplish 18 months into this campaign by trying to play "gotcha" with Trump about birtherism and his support for the war in Iraq? The FactCheck.org mentality is what gave us Trump in the first place. There are only three possible responses to it: self-congratulatory nodding from people who were never going to vote for him in the first place, boredom, and aggravated contrarianism. I made a resolution a few days ago not to look at Twitter during the debate and I don’t plan on playing catch-up with Vox or John King later.
People at home—to say nothing of those of us in the fourth estate—were expecting fireworks tonight. CNN was billing this initial encounter at Hofstra as a kind of Wrestlemania-cum-rap battle. What we got was a 90-minute snoozefest. It would be interesting to know how many of the 100 or so million people changed the channel or turned off their TVs when it became clear that the evening’s exchange was going to be far less interesting than President Obama’s first debate with Mitt Romney. By my count, the audience ignored Holt and the suits from the Commission on Presidential Debates four times in order to laugh at Trump’s jokes. There was one round of applause for Clinton, who, if you ask me, won this thing hands down.