No. of Recommendations: 19
And yet, that's not what she did. She goaded him into talking about rallies and what not and got him to spend time whinging away at that instead of hammering home the points he wanted to make.
Which is why that's exactly what she did.
Again, her goal was to remind voters of the Trump days. That they've seen the Trump story before, that he's not new, and to get him to demonstrate live and on camera That Same Old Trump Trumpiness.
She was able to get him to do what she wanted, rather than what he should have done to help himself. Meanwhile, she managed to make the right choice almost every single time - what to ignore, what to counterattack, what to criticize, what to deflect from.
But what *didn't* she do? She didn't say anything concrete last night. Not a winning strategy when you're trying to present your self as a Fresh Faced Unknown Candidate.
Why is that not a winning strategy in a debate? There's a reason why candidates campaign in poetry and govern in prose. You have to try to give voters enough detail so that they know who you are, but not so much that you end up appealing only to a very narrow slice of the electorate.
It's the reason why Trump dodged on his health care plan. The "concepts of a plan." Because while it's the case that a large proportion of his base dislikes Obamacare (whether the details or in spirit), the constituency for any single specific alternative to Obamacare is much smaller.
The same is true on abortion for Trump, and why he tries so hard to dodge on that as well. Nearly everyone in the GOP disagrees with the Democrats' position on abortion - so being against the Democrats is a very safe place to be. But any specific alternative to the Democrats (complete ban? six weeks? fifteen weeks? exceptions for rape and incest? how to define health of mother? what to do with currently-healthy ectopic pregnancy?) will only appeal to a part of the coalition.
It's not a winning strategy if your opponent can use it to attack you. Had Trump used the debate to try to pin her down on details, or to effectively attack her for not having specific proposals, or even just to call attention to the fact that she was doing it, then it could have been a problem for her. But instead, she was able to derail him into an Airing of Grievances.
