How Hillary Clinton’s Pitch-perfect Put-downs May Have Changed the Race - By Frank Rich

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today: the first 2016 presidential debate.

Going into last night’s debate, polls showed Hillary Clinton’s lead over Donald Trump continuing to shrink. But a CNN/ORC instant poll right after the debate found that she’d won it by more than a two-to-one margin. Should her performance last night be enough to move the needle back?
We’ll have to wait for polls a few days from now for the answer to that question. But let’s pause for one moment to savor how Clinton performed last night. My heart sank with her first answer, to a question about job creation: her usual diligent wonky A-student’s recitation of a list of prefab economic proposals that the brain instantly tunes out, that no one thinks will ever happen, and that have been promised by Democratic politicians in every presidential election since Carter and then Mondale were slaughtered by Ronald Reagan.

But what followed was something of a miracle: Hillary from then on mustered a pitch-perfect response to the boor on the other side of the split screen. She stuck to substance (of which he had none) and waited out his diatribes (many long waits) either by looking slightly bemused or by outright laughing at his absurdities. She refused to get lost in the weeds of his many lies and factual errors — urging viewers to consult fact-checkers online instead — and allowed herself some actual wit. “If we’re actually going to look at the facts … ” she said early on, throwing the line away lightly but devastatingly (though her target seemed oblivious to the dig). When Trump went on and on to try to pin his own birtherism campaign on her, a foolhardy errand in which he assumed the audience understood his oblique references to Sidney Blumenthal and Patti Solis Doyle, she retorted, smilingly, with “Just listen to what you heard.” It was a perfect response, directing the audience simply to watch her opponent as he choked on his own incoherent gusher of words. And when Trump went on his bizarre tear about how he had really, truly been opposed to the Iraq War early on, and how Sean Hannity could vouch for him despite all the evidence to the contrary, she replied with an even bigger smile and the mot juste for the moment: “O-kay!”

Finally, there was that great final-round climax when she refused to allow Trump, who tried to brush past the fact that he had attacked her for not having a “presidential look,” to change the subject from “looks to stamina,” as she put it. She cited a number of his misogynistic slurs, then brought it home with a fresh incident, his referring to a beauty-pageant contestant who didn’t meet his physical standards as “Miss Housekeeping” because she was Hispanic. It was a tough and stirring moment, for which Trump could muster no better response than another attack on Rosie O’Donnell. Sad!

All that said, the margin in the instant debate-night poll was virtually the same as the margin that had Mitt Romney killing Barack Obama in the first debate of 2012. I will say for the hundredth time that the one thing Trump is right about is that his supporters would still vote for him if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue. And they will still vote for him after this debate. This was a big night for fact-checking by a plethora of major news organizations, but what’s lost in this frenzy of media empiricism, worthy as it is, is that Trump’s supporters don’t care about the facts any more than he does. This election is a culture war, not a debate over policy, and in that war Trump is the white-guys’ guy.

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