Political pundits today want to know “who won the debate?” It’s the wrong question. Who lost the debate? That is the question. And the answer is? The American people lost the debate.
For this first of three debates, moderator Lester Holt framed the debate in three broad categories: “America’s Direction,” “Achieving Prosperity,” and “Securing America.” It sounded promising to me. In more normal times, the event would have entailed a rousing debate between two presidential candidates in which they contrasted their policy plans for those three areas so that the American people could have some clearer ideas by which to help them decide who to vote for on November 8.
But not between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. Oh no. In more normal times, a little sniping at each other between candidates is to be expected, and often couched in a little humor. But not this time. Oh no. Instead, Clinton and Trump spent most of the 90 minutes getting under each other’s skin, poking at raw, sensitive areas in each other’s lives, and then replying with cutting retorts to try to save the moment.
Both candidates have said so many horrible things about each other in the past and are implicated in so many very questionable activities, that this first debate became all about that stuff – i.e., about their personal lives – instead of about the America people – the very people they say they say want to represent and help when they set up shop in the Oval Office.
That’s all I want to say, really. We the people lost. That is the story of the first debate. It is the outcome of having the two most unpopular presidential candidates in modern history. It is sad, very sad. And sadder still is that it is a reflection of us, the American people. May God have mercy on us.
©2016 by Charles Strohmer
Image courtesy of scienceblogs.com
For other posts on this blog about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, see these, beginning with this one: To Boldly Go: anti-Trump Republicans Speak Out [June 11]; Donald Trump Is Wrong about the Founding of ISIS [Aug 12]; A Christian View of Not Voting for Donald Trump of Hillary Clinton [Aug 25]; Is Donald Trump Merely Lending His Name to “America”? [Sept 16]; Predicting Presidential Debates [Sept 23].
Having recently returned from three weeks in England, I can tell you it was a relief not to be Trump-blitzed everyday by the media. But I’ll also tell you this. When conversation in my home-away-from-home turned to American politics, as it frequently did, not one person I spoke to – and I was with many different kinds of people in varied contexts and cities – was a fan of the Trumpster.
It began this way, 35,000 feet above the Atlantic, flying from London to Atlanta:
Most people had forgotten all about it, but Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump recently revived a comment he had made in January, stating that President Obama was the founder of ISIS. “President Obama. He’s the founder of ISIS,” Trump said at a 
In his op-ed, Morrell also argues persuasively why Trump is not only unqualified to be President but that he has already posed a threat to U.S. national security. A few days later, Morell was on the Charlie Rose television show for a major interview, in which he explained in great detail why he wrote the op-ed. You owe it to yourself to 
“[T]here are certain standards more important than one year’s election. There are certain codes that if you betray them, you suffer something much worse than a political defeat. Donald Trump is an affront to basic standards of honesty, virtue and citizenship. He pollutes the atmosphere in which our children are raised. He has already shredded the unspoken rules of political civility that make conversation possible. In his savage regime, public life is just a dog-eat-dog war of all against all.”
In a song by Sting, one of the world’s more intelligent singer-songwriters, he admits that he’s lost his lost faith in politicians because “they all seem like game show hosts to me.” It aptly expressed a sentiment held by many people twenty years ago, when “
Waging Wisdom 