Clinton is preparing for the debate. Trump isn't. That matters.

Clinton is preparing for the debate. Trump isn't. That matters.
Updated by Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias matt@vox.com Sep 26, 2016, 8:30a



Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, two very different people running very different presidential campaigns, have, not surprisingly, taken very different approaches to preparing for tonight’s debate.

“One looks to be hunkering down with homework, research, and rehearsals,” Monica Alba and Ali Vitali reported for NBC News, “while the other seems to be taking an on-the-fly casual approach to what could be the most important 90 minutes of the presidential election.”

You’ll never guess which candidate is which. No, of course you will.

Trump’s aides are probably underplaying his level of preparation to lower expectations, but on some level we all know in our hearts that it’s true — Trump is not sitting around studying briefing books and making sure he has accurate and detailed answers on everything that might conceivably come up. We’ve seen him in debates and high-stakes interviews before, and he almost certainly is going to more or less wing it and figure that it doesn’t really matter if that means he says things that are false or offensive.

Clinton is the one doing prep work. She’s prepping because the debate is important, and preparing for important moments is what sensible people do. And something that’s tended to get lost amid the frog memes and whatnot of 2016 is that working with a competent team to read briefing books and release white papers is a crucially important part of being president.

It’s a big, difficult job in which mistakes can have catastrophic consequences for the lives of millions of people, and where you don’t get to declare bankruptcy and start over again if you mess up. You don’t have to walk into the Oval Office knowledgeable about every issue under the sun on day one to be successful — nobody’s ever met that standard, and nobody ever will — but you do need a credible team, and you need to be able to get up to speed.

This difference will show up at the debate, allowing Clinton to give factually defensible and politically tenable answers to a range of questions on weighty matters. That’s hard to do, and Trump won’t be able to pull it off on the fly, which is why he has recently been working the refs to explain that debate moderators should let him get away with lying.

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http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/9/26/13024476/debate-preparation