Great article on debate strategy

Hillary Clinton calls in experts in calculated plan to destroy Donald Trump in the debates

Washington: Given myriad allegations of sexual harassment against GOP candidate Donald Trump, his campaign boss Steve Bannon and former Fox News chief Roger Ailes who is advising Trump, it doesn't bear thinking of how they might deploy their collective understanding of women in plotting to take down the first woman to seek the presidency in the forthcoming candidates' debates.

The Trump team casts his prep-sessions as chats over hotdogs and burgers at his golf club at Bedminster, New Jersey, in which that collective wisdom might be expected kick in – and they pooh-pooh a forensic effort that has its own chilling calculations, that emerges in reports on the brainstorming at Camp Clinton.

But save for a so-called 'October surprise', that unexpected event that has the power to throw the campaign dynamic, these three debates – the first will be televised live on September 26 – are probably the last opportunity for Clinton to consolidate, or to blow the lead she has built since the parties' July conventions.

There's a lot of talk about the candidates' mastery of policy detail. But stripped to the bone, the strategy in each camp seems to be more about personal destruction of the other – finding the human weakness that can be triggered to humiliate, to annihilate, to destroy.

http://www.theage.com.au/world/us-election/hillary-clinton-calls-in-experts-in-calculated-plan-to-destroy-donald-trump-in-the-debates-20160830-gr54rd.html

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The journalist, Paul McGeogh, is a Fairfax, Australia, US political correspondent.