And the Winner is...

 In the debate it seems to me that Kamala clearly came out ahead in that she spoke to those in the middle who may be the ones to decide the election outcome.  She also did a good job of getting under Trump's skin with reminders of Trump's compulsive lying, his legal and ethical vulnerabilities, and his waffling about his abortion stance.

Trump stuck to his script pretty well, emphasizing those issues which he thinks favor his chances.  However, he seemed unable to resist the bizarre extremes believable only to his faithful followers such as the stories about people's pets being eaten, or the extravagant and unsupported claims about migrant criminality.

The debate is not the election, and it alone will not be determinant in the final outcome.  Trump has unlimited financial support which will help to produce the appearance of a more coherent platform in the time remaining.

Harris made some unforced errors which she may be penalized for.  She could have taken a lot of wind out of the attacks on her stance on fracking by just pointing out that the advances in green tech will gradually make the phase-out of coal and oil inevitable.

The Harris response on gun violence was woefully weak.  The only response she came up with was a statement that both she and Walz are gun owners!   No mention of the most recent school massacre?  That is quite a missed opportunity.

Harris elected to stick with the Biden's position of calling for a ceasefire in Gaza without backing that up with any proposals for U.S. actions that could actually force a stop to the indiscriminate bombing.  Unless she can make at least some move in the direction of real action, she is endangering the support of people like me for whom Gaza is a high priority.

Kamala may have tipped the scale slightly in her favor with this night's performance.  However, as Hillary showed us, just winning the popular vote - even by over a million or two - is not enough in our electoral system.

UPDATE:

Lots of media commentary contrasting the Harris and Trump performances.  The best I saw was from Ben Burgis  at The Jacobin.  He recognized the superior showing by Harris, but also put her performance into the larger context of American society and politics:

...We live in a profoundly unequal and militaristic society. America is the only developed country where cash-strapped diabetics die because they try to ration out their insulin. Our billionaires take private space flights while our working class is one of the only in the world that isn’t guaranteed so much as a single day per year of paid vacation. And as Americans argue about what to read into the tea leaves of the latest polls from Pennsylvania, US-supplied bombs are dismembering children in Gaza...

Biden's Failure

He mumbled incoherently.

He failed to call out Trump on the ridiculous lies and claims about migrants.

He made no mention of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza or the need to hold Israel accountable for waging a genocidal war.

The Dem Debate

I'm looking forward to Thursday's debate by the ten Democratic candidates.  Could be a game changer as everyone will be looking to peel off some of Biden's support.  But, three hours?  That is going to take a real marathon effort.  I usually get some help from the team at fivethirtyeight.com with their running commentary on the debaters' performances.  I wish I had that kind of mental agility.  I'm wondering what other strategies people have for sticking it out to the end?

6:00 PM Mountain Time!

So, here we are...

The day of the first Presidential debate.  Going out a bit on a limb, I'm predicting that Trump will be widely seen as the debate winner.  The debate format works against a reasonable discussion about issues; it is all about one-liners and character attacks.  Hence, an environment favorable to a circus performer like Trump.  Of course, Hillary is a tough campaigner, and she will have around ninety minutes to rattle Trump's cage.  Judging by her past performances, however, it seems unlikely she will set the place on fire.

It was fun during the primaries to watch the Republican establishment try to come to grips with the Trump phenomenon.  I suggested then that the best strategy for Trump's Republican opponents was to back Hillary.  It seemed an obvious alternative.  If elected, Clinton is unlikely to rock the boat significantly.  And, with what would amount to an Obama third term and small Democratic congressional gains, the Republicans would be able to go on playing their same obstructionist game at the Federal level while further tightening their grip on State Houses.

Quite a few main-line Republicans adopted my suggested strategy to back Clinton.  However, as Trump's candidacy became increasingly viable, a strategic change got under way among the Republican leadership.  The big shots may not be singing praises to Trump, but the party machine is backing him.  The Republicans in office are seeing the possibility that Trump could take office, and speaking out against him at this point raises a clear risk of being out of the loop following a Trump victory.

Of course, nobody in their right mind thinks Trump would be a competent President.  He is wholly inexperienced in techniques of governance and ignorant about any of the important issues.  Being a bully with money got him the nomination, but that is not going to work for the daily challenge of running the country.  So, what is the Republican establishment thinking will happen with Trump in the oval office?

My guess is that they are preparing for two scenarios.  The first would be something along the lines of the Bush presidency.  People who have some experience and competence in governance will be moved into key positions, much as Cheney took over foreign affairs and energy policy.  Trump would then be free to occupy a largely ceremonial role as chief cheer leader -- provided, that is, that he could actually exercise some self control and not completely go off the rails.  Even without those not unlikely missteps Trump's mere presence as chief of state will create a world of uncertainty.  Other world leaders, reacting to Trump's unpredictability will take actions based on fears or perceived advantage which will create some truly terrifying international crises.  It is not hard to imagine, for instance, that Putin will see Trump's ascendancy as an opportunity to undertake an immediate invasion of Ukraine.

The other scenario likely envisioned by the Republican leadership is impeachment.  Even without the likely foreign policy or economic disasters to be expected from a Trump presidency, it will likely not be hard to find some pretext for kicking the clown out of office, and it certainly would not be hard to put together a bipartisan effort to do the deed.  The outcome of a successful impeachment would be a President Pence.  So, now the Republicans have someone in office who has the skills and experience to enact the Republican agenda -- moving the Supreme Court back to the right, stalling climate change action, supporting big energy, big pharma and big banks, and solidifying the blockade of women's rights.  Etc.

---------------

The next day:

Trump turned in a poor performance.  I don't know that will lose him any votes among his current supporters.  My sense is that they see Trump as what they might be if only they could win the lottery -- still ignorant and inarticulate, but insanely rich.

Speaking Truth to Power

On a Saturday night the audience for the Democratic Debate was predictably meager.  Those who did tune in, however, got a revealing look at the three current contenders for the nomination.

Bernie Sanders came out looking strong and confident by choosing to emphasize his fundamental differences with Clinton.  He was unequivocal in asserting that health care, economic security and educational opportunity are fundamental human rights.  Sanders' did a good job of countering Clinton's effort to undercut him on the issue of gun control by stressing the importance turning down the heat of that part of the debate, and looking for common ground in common sense.

O'Malley polished his liberal credentials by pointing out Clinton's inconsistencies and by bashing Trump's bombastic racism.  When it came to remedies, however, he offered little beyond platitudes.  Realistically, there is zero chance that he will be the nominee in this election.  If O'Malley stays in the race through the initial primaries, it will likely be based on the idea that, of the three current contenders, he is the only one young enough to still be in the running in 2020.

Hillary pushed the right emotional buttons to maintain her standing with women and minorities.  She had no answer to Sanders' confronting her with her debts to her Wall Street backers; her effort to link her acceptance of big money backing to 9-11 seemed like a rather pathetic imitation of G.W. Bush.  She looked more self-confident in talking about the complexities of dealing with the radical Islamist challenge, but also showed no originality in proposing how to deal with that issue.

The most revealing aspect of the debate in regard to Clinton was her response to Sanders' proposal that a college education should be universally available at no direct cost to students and their families.  She replied that she did not think that the American people should be asked to pay for Trump's children to go to college.

Media pundits will praise Clinton's smirking response as a an effective zinger while ignoring the fact that the American people are already paying for Trump's kids to go college, as well as for Trump's private jet and any number of other of his billionaire perks based on a broken tax system.  To be fair, the same should be said of Chelsea's stint at Stanford because, as Trump has pointed out, the Clinton's and the Trumps travel in the same circles.  In the end, what Clinton is really asking of the American people is that they make a rather fine distinction between the "bad" oligarchs like Trump and the "good" oligarchs like Bill and Hillary.

Greening the Debate

The Blue Marble—Earth seen by Apollo 17 in 1972

How nice it would be if the 11/14 debate participants would offer up some clear ideas about what can and must be done to combat climate change.  Here is one possibility from the economist, Robert Pollin, layed out in a Boston Review forum article about a year ago:

"Federal building efficiency program. In 2007 Congress passed the Energy Independence and Security Act, which mandates that 75 percent of the more than 300,000 buildings owned by the federal government undergo efficiency retrofits. The goal is to reduce energy usage by 30 percent by 2015, relative to 2003 levels. But even though the bill passed with bipartisan support, there has been little progress in bringing the project to scale. By May of this year, only 1,702 buildings had been retrofitted, about 0.3 percent of the number targeted. Yet the government reports that even this modest level of implementation produced $840 million in annual energy savings for taxpayers. Advancing the project would easily save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars per year. It would also demonstrate to private building owners how much they can save through retrofitting."

You would think that the possibility to "...easily save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars per year" would catch to eye of just about any politician, and as Pollin notes the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 did have bipartisan support.  Realistically, though, in view of the vacumn of ideas among the Republican candidates, my expectation would be that all of them would suggest that simply down-sizing government would achieve the same objectives as retrofitting federal buildings.  Of course, the first target on their government hit list would be the Environmental Protection Agency, leaving us no objective way to measure climate damage, or to map out and enforce mitigation efforts.

what now?

Webb and Chafee are out of the running. O'Malley will likely hang in through the Iowa and New Hampshire debates.  That leaves mostly Clinton and Sanders to duke it out five more times, with a possible sixth encounter at the the MoveOn forum.  There is some pressure from the non-Clinton wing to expand the number of debates, but it is a little hard to imagine that the Dems could gain enough of a national media audience to support additional debates unless they moved to the carnival freak show format that the Republicans have opted for.

Clinton's debate objective will be to undercut Sanders by cherry-picking issues that help her to shore up her credentials with the party's left wing.  She will continue to hammer him on gun control until -- if and when -- she gets the nomination, and then she'll evolve to a more moderate position.  Clinton will likely make references to the Supreme Court's money in politics position, but she'll say nothing which will seriously  irritate her big bucks backers.  Neither Clinton nor Sanders will have anything substantive to say about the Israel-Palestine confrontation.

Sanders' task now is to counter the Clinton/big-media story line that the race is already over before the first primaries.  His email campaign is presently focused on showing his consistent civil rights stance over a period of many years with an eye toward gaining more traction with blacks, hispanics and the LGBT communities.  Those efforts are no doubt based on accurate perceptions of the lay of the land, but Sanders will also need to come up with better answers than he had available in the first debate regarding his economic analysis and specific and credible remedies.  To is credit, Sanders is the only one in the race who consistently alludes to the fact that achieving the presidency does not translate to leading the way to real changes without the support of millions of Americans -- that is, the achievement of a progressive majority in Congress.