Part of me is dreading the Presidential Debate on Monday night. It's the part that watches these things get scored like demented boxing matches with the pundits and pollsters as judges. Really all that matters is how the polls move over the following week or two…but we have to hear from the Trump campaign about how their boy flattened Hillary and the election is over; from the Clinton campaign how Hillary devastated The Donald and reduced him to a quivering mound of orange Jell-o; how whoever any pundit favors, he or she won in a walk…and, of course, how the moderator, Lester Holt, was so blatantly unfair and/or inept to ask this but not that.
For a lot of folks, the main issue is not what either candidate would do to and for America but do they speak the truth? So Trump will say something like "Sacramento is the capital of Oregon" and if the moderator corrects him, that shows bias against Trump, and if the moderator doesn't correct him, that shows journalistic ineptness and/or a bias against Hillary. And we'll have Trump partisans out there saying that no matter what anyone says, Sacramento is the capital of Oregon and that's that.
We'll also have analysts making a big deal out of the candidates' body language, facial expressions, whether they seemed to be paying attention, wardrobe selection, etc. And someone will claim that the debates were rigged because someone got the questions in advance, someone had a hidden earpiece feeding them zingers, someone planted folks in the audience to cheer or boo, etc.
So I guess it isn't that I don't like the debates. I don't like the scoring and the spin. Even the post-debate polls, which will say who "won" the proceedings will have a lot of votes cast for the respondents' preference, regardless of how he or she actually fared in the telecast. And like I said, all that really matters is how the actual polling of the country as a whole and the individual state races go in the days that follow.
I expect Hillary will do well in terms of facts and policies and explaining her positions. I expect Donald will do well in terms of theatrics and quotable lines. I expect Lester Holt will do well in terms of not making the mistakes of Matt Lauer. And I expect this will be the most-watched Presidential Debate in history. Until the first rematch.