Clinton shifts the election in her direction
By E.J. Dionne Jr. Opinion writer
September 27 at 12:06 AM
Donald Trump scowled and fumed and fussed and interrupted. On Monday night, he was forced to defend business practices that involved not paying workers and contractors, a tax plan that offers most of its benefits to the wealthy, the fact that he did not pay any federal taxes in some years (which he called “smart”) and the debt incurred by his businesses.
Hillary Clinton wanted to remind Americans of the Trump they had grown accustomed to disliking, the man who demeaned women, minorities and immigrants. Trump helped her out, even debating the moderator, Lester Holt, about “stop and frisk” police tactics. He grunted “ugh” when Clinton called out his sweeping comments on the allegedly parlous state of African American communities.
Trump again tried to put the birther issue behind him and failed. The man who built his base on the right end of the Republican Party by insinuating that President Obama was born abroad tried to slough off a question about what had once been his signature cause, but Clinton bore in and linked his treatment of the nation’s first African American president to what she called “his long record of racist behavior.”
The surprise of the debate was that Clinton put before voters a new Trump to dislike. Trump has campaigned as a populist paladin of the working class. But the Trump that Clinton described was a plutocrat who walked away from debts and obligations to his own employees. She pushed the debate into an extended discussion of how Trump had become wealthy and turned what he sees as one of his central assets, his business acumen, into what could become a big liability as the campaign goes forward.
If one use of a debate for a candidate is to change the trajectory of the campaign discussion, Clinton may well have succeeded in opening a new front against Trump.
more:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/clinton-shifts-the-election-in-her-direction/2016/09/27/c0b84950-845d-11e6-a3ef-f35afb41797f_story.html?tid=hybrid_collaborative_2_na&utm_term=.226b642c014c
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