The Final Debate

The debate. I didn't watch it. I listened to it on Sirius radio as I drove back from San Diego. I, therefore, did not see the faces, the gestures or any of the other body language. Just listening to it, however, I thought Trump won most of it. He certainly gave the best summation either of the two has given at the end of any of the debates. He rocked her on the Clinton Foundation and on Wikileaks. I thought her answers were weak and tired.

Got to give credit to Chris Wallace who I thought was BY FAR the best moderator of the Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates. He brought up topics previously ignored and pressed both candidates, and did a credible job of controlling both candidates without being obnoxious.

As usual, however, Trump gave the media something to yammer on about. He, again, stepped on his own performance. He, frankly, gave a bad answer on the question of whether he would accept the results of the election if he lost. I cringed while driving upon hearing his "I'll keep you in suspense." That gave Clinton the opening to launch one of her faux patriotic speeches about how that was unprecedented in 240 years of American elections, blah, blah, blah. She, of course, ignored, among others, the election of 1860, when a good chunk of American states seceded from the Union because they would not accept the election of Abraham Lincoln, and, more recently and less dramatic, Al Gore's lengthy refusal to admit he had been beaten in Florida by George W. Bush--both of those refusals, by the way, were by the Democratic Party. Trump needs a better answer, especially since his running mate and his own daughter have stated that, of course, Trump would accept the results. Bad coordination that.

I think Trump should have turned the question around and said something along the lines of, "Hillary, will you, right now, disavow the actions of your party--which we learned about through Wikileaks--to disrupt my rallies with violence and intimidate my followers? Will you join me in insisting that voters must be US citizens and that poll workers must insist that those who vote are indeed Americans and eligible to vote? Will you ask your party machine to help scrub from the rolls dead voters, illegal aliens, felons, etc.? Will you promise not to do what you did to Bernie Sanders? Will you abandon the Democratic Party's long, long history of electoral violence and fraud?"

Anyhow, yes, I think Trump "won" the debate, but will it make a difference? How many genuinely undecided were watching? Plus, of course, millions of people, living and dead, American and foreign, already have cast ballots in the idiotic process known as "early voting."