“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Paul Krugman: Fiscal Foolishness
Over all, Chris Wallace was better than I expected. But he was pretty bad on fiscal issues.
First of all, still obsessing over the debt? Still taking leads from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget? Federal debt simply isn’t a pressing issue; there is no possible reason to make a big deal about it while neglecting climate change, where every year that action is delayed makes the problem harder to solve.
Then there was the discussion of economic policy. It was really bad – and inappropriate – when Wallace talked about the Obama stimulus, and simply asserted that it “led” to slow growth. That was editorializing, and bad economics.
The past eight years have actually been a huge experiment in macroeconomics. Saying that the Obama stimulus was followed by slow growth is a terrible argument: When you spend money to fight a terrible slump, weren’t any disappointments in performance arguably caused by whatever caused the slump, not by the rescue operation? But we have a lot of other evidence, all of which says that spending money in a slump helps the economy, and that the Obama stimulus was therefore the right thing to do.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: Our Long National Debate Nightmare Is Over
“No, you’re the puppet!”
Well, that was grueling. How did the third and final debate manage to be so sensationalistic and yet at the same time so boring? It seemed to go on forever.
The media declared that Donald Trump lost the debate the moment he refused to promise he’d accept the election outcome, saying “I will keep you in suspense, okay?” But they couched their outrage in the warm, soft glow of insular self-satisfaction. There are deep problems with our democracy, and with the journalistic profession that is supposed to serve it.
Trump’s statement wasn’t outrageous because it violated Beltway decorum. It was outrageous because it was an incitement to racial hatred. Neither moderator Chris Wallace nor the commentators afterward explored the racist subtext behind it: the notion that people of color, especially in the inner cities, are “stealing” elections through voter fraud.
It is “so important that you watch other communities,” Trump told a mostly-white crowd recently, “because we don’t want this election stolen from us.”>
Other communities. We. Us. “Everybody knows what I’m talking about,” Trump said. Yes, we do, Donald.
It was surprising to hear reporters say that they’d considered the debate a draw until that moment. That’s not grading on a curve. It’s grading on a cliff — the one we’re being led over by a political/media complex that treats politics like a game and elections like a half-time show.
Heather Digby Parton: The night Donald Trump undermined democracy: Where’s all this going, after the election? Not someplace good
After Donald Trump became the presumptive nominee last spring, he went before a West Virginia audience and said, “You’ve been hearing me say it’s a rigged system, but now I don’t say it anymore because I won. It’s true. Now I don’t care. I don’t care. And the only way I won was I won by such big margins because it is a rigged system. But the only way you can do it, it’s like a boxer, you got to knock them out then you don’t got to worry about the judges.”
He didn’t win by big margins. He won by grinding it out in primary after primary, winning just enough in a huge field to come in first with far less than a majority. But Trump is a total stranger to the truth and he says whatever he needs to say to get through the moment.
The polls show that Trump is lagging far behind right now, and on Wednesday night in the final presidential debate in Las Vegas, when Chris Wallace asked him if he would accept the results of the upcoming election, Trump said again that the system is rigged, the media has been dishonest and corrupt and has poisoned the minds of the voters. […]
He refused to say whether he would follow the American tradition of peaceful transfer of power, telling Wallace that he wanted to leave the American people “in suspense.”
This seemed to shock just about everyone, despite the fact that Trump has been saying this at every recent appearance. Apparently people thought that in the formal setting of a nationally televised debate he wouldn’t dare defy the norms of our electoral system, which is silly. That is what he does.
Amanda Marcotte: Hillary Clinton is an actual feminist: She met Trump’s misogyny head on, without apology
Hillary Clinton frequently gets characterized as an overly cautious politician, afraid to go out on a limb and swift to scurry towards some ill-defined “middle” at the first sign of conflict. Part of that reputation is due to people mistaking her for her husband, but part of it is her own fault, as she trended in that direction in the 2008 primaries, leaving it to Barack Obama to portray himself as more liberal, even though Clinton was actually somewhat to the left of her primary opponent.
In Wednesday night’s debate — thankfully the last of this endless election season — Clinton proved her detractors wrong. Her opponent this time, Donald Trump, is an obnoxious misogynist who literally bragged during the debate that he didn’t even apologize to his wife after a tape came out featuring him bragging about sexually assaulting women. Despite this, Trump continues to poll well with over 40 percent of voters. A more skittish politician would see that, assume the country is still incredibly sexist and not ready for a strongly feminist message, and try to find some middle-ground way to tiptoe around the issue of women’s equality.
Clinton did the opposite. Faced with a misogynistic pig with a long record of belittling and objectifying women, Clinton leaned into the idea that voters want a feminist in office. (After all, the last president they elected is one!) Despite decades of pressure from the media to step back, soften her voice, be more submissive and bake more cookies, Clinton made absolutely sure that the debate-watching audience could not doubt her commitment to feminism.
E. J. Dionne Jr.: Unable to control himself, Trump confirms everyone’s worst fears
It was a two-track debate. At times, it was the setting for a detailed argument over serious issues in which Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump offered voters a relatively straightforward clash of progressive and conservative perspectives.
But this is 2016, and eventually the third and final debate on Wednesday reached the fundamental issue of the campaign: whether Trump is fit to be president. Despite her substantial lead in the polls, Clinton did not hang back, as many predicted she would. Instead, she pressed Trump sharply on the entire catalogue of his shortcomings, accusing him of being a “puppet” of Russian President Vladimir Putin and denouncing his treatment of women, his mocking a disabled reporter and his habit of saying that any contest he loses is “rigged” against him. [..]
Had the exchanges come down to an ideological fight and simple tit-for-tat, fire and counterfire, it might have constituted a kind of victory for Trump, given his polling deficit and his gaffes and lies in his earlier debate performances. But as the debate wore on, Trump once again left behind moments that will only reinforce the doubts many voters already have about him.
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