Reactions to the Debate and the Romney Intervention

  1. The Romney speech was vivid, accurate, and tactically obtuse, unless you assume that he is offering himself as an option for a brokered convention.  Trump voters view him as a loser and the very embodiment of the establishment.  If anything, the vehemence of his language will cause them to dig in even deeper.
  2. Hillary, on the other hand, has to be delighted.  She won’t even need to hire a PR firm to do her commercials; she can just use edited versions of this speech, and the debates.
  3. I agree that the moderators need to fact check answers that are given during the debate, but I don’t think it was even remotely evenhanded of them to run film of just one candidate’s flip-flops.  The role of the moderators should be to ask policy questions that cause the candidates to distinguish their positions, and to get out of the way.  All that notwithstanding, the Fox News panel makes for great TV.
  4. If this had occurred six months ago, it probably would have been the end of the Trump campaign; he was on the defensive all night, and his weaknesses as a candidate were laid bare for all to see.  As it stands today, I don’t think it matters; the voters have already seen enough to make up their minds.  The only remaining question is whether we will have a decisive Trump victory and a walk-out by part of the GOP establishment, or a brokered convention and a walk-out by Trump.  We will probably know the answer to that in two weeks.