“Political satire became obsolete”, was the songwriter Tom Lehrer’s memorable quip, “when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Watching Sunday night’s second presidential debate in St Louis, at times it felt like watching a Saturday Night Live pastiche. Try as I might, I couldn’t get Alec Baldwin’s sniffling Donald Trump or Kate McKinnon’s over-prepared Hillary Clinton out of my head.
Both candidates duly lived up to their caricatures. On joining each other on stage there was no handshake, just a curt, mutual “hello” as if they were passing each other in a shopping mall. Clinton offered up some cheese (“I wanna be the president for all Americans!”) while Trump had a conversation with himself about having unwittingly become a politician, despite working hard to pose as an anti-politician. Confronted early on about his badinage with Billy Bush, the Donald said his “locker-room talk” wasn’t as bad as ISIS. He hadn’t actually said those things, nor had he acted upon the stuff he hadn’t said.
Read more: NBC suspends Today host Billy Bush for role on Donald Trump tape
Initially, Clinton was coolly effective, her every line clearly rehearsed a dozen times. On the contrary, she posited, this was “who Donald Trump is” but not “who we are”. “It’s just words folks,” retorted a clearly agitated Trump, “just words.” Fortified by his pre-debate press conference he then laid into Bill Clinton, who was sitting stony-faced in the audience, as if were running for office rather than his wife.
At least Clinton’s “words” fell into some sort of order, Trump’s were the usual mangled, rambling, verbose magical mystery tours of the English language. If elected president, he’d appoint a “special prosecutor” tasked with sending Crooked Hillary to jail. At this point Clinton’s general air of incredulity gave way to a premature departure from her stool in order to fight back, expressing gratitude that Trump wasn’t in charge of the criminal justice system. “Because you’d be in jail,” he shot back, at least demonstrating that some wit resides under that mop of blond hair.
Read more: NBC suspends Today host Billy Bush for role on Donald Trump tape
But while generally orderly, Clinton did, on occasion, overdose on “words”, deploying overly complicated explanations where something more concise would have sufficed. She apologised (again) about her emails, but didn’t really sound like she meant it, while constantly plugging her website as if she were on a talk show. Asked about possessing “a public and a private stance”, she burbled on about the Lincoln biopic. He’d used different arguments to persuade different people, what she called “a great display of presidential leadership”.
At that Trump pounced, ridiculing Clinton for blaming it all on the “late, great” Abe and, strange though it may seem, the Republican candidate wasn’t a complete disaster. This time, he’d clearly done some preparation, while by sheer force of personality he managed to dominate Clinton, who often looked resigned to the whole thing and, on occasion, allowed her admirable poise to lapse. He also handled the final, counterintuitive question about his opponent’s merits surprisingly well.
Read more: NBC suspends Today host Billy Bush for role on Donald Trump tape
But it’s all relative. Trump planned to replace Obamacare with “something”; Islamophobia was a “shame”; he knew “nothing about Russia”; “of course” he used his financial losses to write off federal income tax, and so on, all punctuated by sniffs: big ones, little ones, short ones and long ones – sniffle connoisseurs must have been wetting themselves.
Meanwhile the much-vaunted “town hall” format was essentially dispensed with after the first question, quickly morphing into a standard debate moderated by Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz with occasional contributions from the small Missouri audience. Their follow-up questions were fine, but neither could really control the Donald, who resorted early on to his usual allegation of mainstream media “three against one” bias. I can’t wait to see what Saturday Night Live does with it.
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