Presidential Debates Quotes

One of the most critical strengths of a superior competitor in any discipline—whether we are speaking about sports, business negotiations, or even presidential debates—is the ability to dictate the tone of the battle.

Discourse and critical thinking are essential tools when it comes to securing progress in a democratic society. But in the end, unity and engaged participation are what make it happen.

The Bible is right: A deluge of images does encourage idolatry. Look at the cults of personality in America today. Look at Hollywood. Look at Washington. I'd like to see the next presidential race be run according to Second Commandment principles. No commercials. A radio-only debate. We need an ugly president. I know we're missing out on some potential Abe Lincolns because they'd look gawky and gangly on TV.

The specific use of folks as an exclusionary and inclusionary signal, designed to make the speaker sound like one of the boys or girls, is symptomatic of a debasement of public speech inseparable from a more general erosion of American cultural standards. Casual, colloquial language also conveys an implicit denial of the seriousness of whatever issue is being debated: talking about folks going off to war is the equivalent of describing rape victims as girls (unless the victims are, in fact, little girls and not grown women). Look up any important presidential speech in the history of the United States before 1980, and you will find not one patronizing appeal to folks. Imagine: 'We here highly resolve that these folks shall not have died in vain; and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.

Ailes said they were there for their weekly debate prep. The first presidential debate against Hillary Clinton was a month and a half away, on September 26. “Debate prep?” Bannon said. “You, Christie and Rudy?” “This is the second one.” “He’s actually prepping for the debates?” Bannon said, suddenly impressed. “No, he comes and plays golf and we just talk about the campaign and stuff like that. But we’re trying to get him in the habit.

Having an energy conversation without talking about climate is like talking about smoking and not talking about cancer.

Not everyone can be relaxed or comfortable enough to seriously listen to the (debate or interview) answers.

The author's alliterative description of politics since the 1960 presidential debates: "Government by Gotcha".

It is a sign of the shallowness of the presidential debate process that their most memorable moments have centered not on issues but on gestures or quips.)

on. It took a Trump to look her in the eye with seventy million people watching during one of the presidential debates and say, “You are a liar and a crook,” which she was both. Everybody knew it, but only Donald Trump dared to utter it out loud.

when both can’t be true. In 1946, in the days after World War II, presidential advisor Bernard Baruch said, “Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.” Variations have been uttered by U.S. Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and others. Today this seemingly indisputable truth no longer holds. Propaganda is indistinguishable from fact and we find ourselves living in the frightening pages of a George Orwell novel.

I saw, during the midterm campaign of 2006, how difficult it was for opponents of stem cell research to run against hope. And so it was in the 2008 presidential contest. This was hope in the collective, a definition that should always apply to the expression of a people's political will. Christopher Reeve had believed in a formula: optimism + information = hope. In this case, the informing agent was us. Granted, it may all look different in six months to a year, but it is hard not to be buoyed by the desire for positive change as articulated and advanced by Barack Obama. It is okay to hope. This time the aspiration of many will not be derided as desperation by a few, as it was during the stem cell debate of '06. By the time you read this book, President Obama and the 111th Congress will have established federal funding for stem cell research. The dam has broken. Just as I'd hoped.

Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet. What once had been substantive debates about the content of governance will reduce candidates to being spokesmen for a marketing effort pursued by methods whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction. The candidates’ main role may become fund-raising rather than the elaboration of issues. Is the marketing effort designed to convey the candidate’s convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate the reflections of a “big data” research effort into individuals’ likely preferences and prejudices? Can democracy avoid an evolution toward a demagogic outcome based on emotional mass appeal rather than the reasoned process the Founding Fathers imagined?

The fundamental question pertaining to voting ethics which Christians must ask at this presidential election is this: "What are the binding principles established by God in the Bible for selecting a civil magistrate?" All other questions are secondary or irrelevant. Once this standard is determined it is our duty to wisely apply the principles and precepts to our American context and to obey. All attempts by Christians to obfuscate our duty to repair to "the standard" by sprinkling the debate with the theology of pragmatics and partisan politics is a loss to the Church because it means that we are more concerned with manipulating a political process then simply obeying the sovereign God

Politicians’ competence lies not in solving our problems but in convincing us that they will.

Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet. What once had been substantive debates about the content of governance will reduce candidates to being spokesmen for a marketing effort pursued by methods whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction. The

Presidents lie all the time. Really great presidents lie. Abraham Lincoln managed to end slavery in America partially by deception. (In an 1858 debate, he flatly insisted that he had no intention of abolishing slavery in states where it was already legal — he had to say this in order to slow the tide of secession.) Franklin Roosevelt lied about the U.S. position of neutrality until we entered World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. (Though the public and Congress believed his public pledge of impartiality, he was already working in secret with Winston Churchill and selling arms to France.) Ronald Reagan lied about Iran-Contra so much that it now seems like he was honestly confused. Politically, the practice of lying is essential. By the time the Lewinsky story broke, Clinton had already lied about many, many things. (He’d openly lied about his level of commitment to gay rights during the ’92 campaign.) The presidency is not a job for an honest man. It’s way too complex. If honesty drove the electoral process, Jimmy Carter would have served two terms and the 2008 presidential race would have been a dead heat between Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich.

President Reagan had said, in a presidential debate against Walter Mondale, “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.” Imagine: The patron saint of the modern conservative movement made the case for a concept that today would have him pilloried by the right-wing press and those cynical politicians who have learned to exploit division for their own electoral success.

Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history. The idea he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch. He works in the Executive Branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that. And the primary role of the vice president of the United States of America is to support the president of the United States of America, give that president his or her best judgment when sought, and as vice president, to preside over the Senate, only in a time when in fact there's a tie vote. The Constitution is explicit. The only authority the vice president has from the legislative standpoint is the vote, only when there is a tie vote. He has no authority relative to the Congress.

Neither Trump nor his Russian backers spent very much money during the campaign. Television did the advertising for them free of charge. Even the Twitter accounts of MSNBC, CNN, CBS, and NBC mentioned Trump twice as often as they mentioned Clinton. When Russia began to release hacked emails, the networks and the media played along. Russia thus influenced the headlines and even the questions posed in the presidential debates. Content from hacked emails figured in two of the three debates; in the final one, the debate moderator accepted an erroneous Russian recasting of Clinton’s words in a speech, and made of it a central issue.

Here’s what presidential candidate Mitt Romney said about Barack Obama: Barack Obama is not a very good President. He said Barack Obama doesn’t do a very good job on the economy; he said that Obama’s foreign policy has a lot of holes in it; he said Obama has done a pretty poor job across the board of working in bipartisan fashion. But, Romney added, Obama’s a good guy. He’s a good family man, a good husband, a man who believes in the basic principles espoused by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He is not someone you should be afraid of in any way. Essentially, Romney’s campaign slogan was this: “Obama: Good Guy, Bad President.

Donald Trump is rape culture's blathering id, and just a few days after the Access Hollywood tape dropped, then Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton (who, no doubt, has just as many man-made scars as the rest of us) was required to stand next to him on a stage for a presidential debate and remain unflappable while being held to an astronomically higher standard and pretend that he was her equal while his followers persisted in howling that sexism is a feminist myth. While Trump bragged about sexual assault and vowed to suppress disobedient media, cable news pundits spent their time taking a protractor to Clinton's smile - a constant, churning microanalysis of nothing, a subtle subversion of democracy that they are poised to repeat in 2020. And then she lost. (Actually, in a particularly painful living metaphor, she won, but because of institutional peculiarities put in place by long-dead white men, they took it from her and gave it to the man with fewer votes.

And yet the debate was highly informative—if you turned the sound off. The event was broadcast with a split screen so that each presidential candidate was visible while the other candidate was talking. The talk was insipid, but the expressions on the candidates’ faces were fascinating. Trump was serious of mien. He concentrated intently on what Hillary was saying. Sometimes there was a little twitch of annoyance; sometimes, a small frown of disagreement. But mostly he looked deeply thoughtful. (Where he got that look is anyone’s guess. Maybe he purchased it at the same strange haberdashery where Hillary buys her Hillary costume.) Clinton is supposed to be the one with the deep thoughts. But there she was thoughtlessly making rude grimaces whenever Trump was speaking. Mom always said, “You shouldn’t make faces—your face may get stuck that way.” Hillary’s face got stuck that way. She spent the whole evening with a wipe-that-look-off-your-face look on her face. She

The pro-life movement pledged its support, however reluctantly. In return it got a leader who put up a better fight during debates against abortion than any other presidential nominee in history. In the final debate against Hillary Clinton, Trump left her struggling to respond when he said of her opposition to any restriction on abortion, “Well, I think it’s terrible. If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby.”33

When presidential candidate Barack Obama presented himself to the black community, he was not to be believed. It strained credulity to think that a man sporting the same rigorously managed haircut as Jay-Z, a man who was a hard-core pickup basketball player, and who was married to a dark-skinned black woman from the South Side, could coax large numbers of white voters into the booth. Obama’s blackness quotient is often a subject of debate. (He himself once joked, while speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists in 2007, “I want to apologize for being a little bit late, but you guys keep on asking whether I’m black enough.”) But despite Obama’s post-election reluctance to talk about race, he has always displayed both an obvious affinity for black culture and a distinct ability to defy black America’s worst self-conceptions.

But male politicians don’t have to escape to all-male safe spaces to sideline women. There are a variety of manoeuvres they can and do employ to undercut their female colleagues in mixed-gender settings. Interrupting is one: ‘females are the more interrupted gender,’ concluded a 2015 study that found that men were on average more than twice as likely to interrupt women as women were to interrupt men. During a televised ninety-minute debate in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton fifty-one times, while she interrupted him seventeen times. And it wasn’t just Trump: journalist Matt Lauer (since sacked after multiple allegations of sexual harassment) was also found to have interrupted Clinton more often than he interrupted Trump. He also ‘questioned her statements more often’, although Clinton was found to be the most honest candidate running in the 2018 election.

The Constitutional Convention quickly agreed to the proposal of Governor Edmund Randolph of Virginia for a national government of three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. Randolph’s resolution “that a national Judiciary be established” passed unanimously. Debating and defining the powers of Congress in Article I and of the president in Article II consumed much of the delegates’ attention and energy. Central provisions of Article III were the product of compromise and, in its fewer than five hundred words, the article left important questions unresolved. Lacking agreement on a role for lower courts, for example, the delegates simply left it to Congress to decide how to structure them. The number of justices remained unspecified. Article III itself makes no reference to the office of chief justice, to whom the Constitution (in Article I) assigns only one specific duty, that of presiding over a Senate trial in a presidential impeachment.

The Mystery of Futile Debate: Why do we engage endlessly in futile political debates? We can argue politics forever, with nary a hint of progress. The likelihood of anyone changing his or her mind as the result of a political argument is negligible, but we debate anyway. Whether on street corners or on "Meet the Press," political discussions go on and on, and are only rarely resolved by polite compromise. It would be astonishing if a presidential candidate were to decide, mid-debate, that the other candidate was right: CANDIDATE: You know, Senator, I never looked at it that way before, but you're actually completely right! Since it's such an important point, I guess I'll just concede the whole election to you right now -- you are definitely the better candidate. Congratulations! If a candidate actually did say something like that, he or she would soon face overpowering citizen anger** -- at having violated the unspoken rule that debates are supposed to be futile. ** Not to mention, a free one-way ticket to a psychiatric institution.

This mostly restrictionist trend reached an important pivot in 2012. Three major developments prompted this change in direction and momentum. First, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Arizona v. United States opinion, delivering its most consequential decision on the limits of state authority in immigration in three decades. Rejecting several provisions of Arizona's controversial omnibus immigration enforcement bill, SB 1070, the opinion nevertheless still left open possibilities for state and local involvement. Second, President Barack Obama, against the backdrop of a stalemate in comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) in Congress and contentious debates over the role of the federal executive in immigration enforcement, instituted the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) program, providing administrative relief and a form of lawful presence to hundreds of thousands of undocumented youth. Finally, Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate whose platform supported laws like Arizona's and called them a model for the rest of the country, lost his bid for the White House with especially steep losses among Latinos and immigrant voters. After these events in 2012, restrictive legislation at the state level waned in frequency, and a growing number of states began to pass laws aimed at the integration of unauthorized immigrants. As this book goes to press, this integrationist trend is still continuing.

Trump has called the media ‘enemies of the people’.59 This is central to Trump’s approach to politics: whether a deliberate strategy or the result of lifelong habit, Trump has no respect for the idea of the fourth estate, a media holding power to account. Everything must be a row, not a debate – the media aren’t checking his claims, or his details; they’re standing against him and his supporters. Trump’s style of politics needs an enemy, and with Clinton dispatched in the presidential election, the media are the perfect choice for the role.

He insinuated that, unlike all previous candidates, he might not accept as legitimate a clear win by his opponent. At the final presidential debate on October 19, when asked by moderator Chris Wallace if he would honor the election results, Trump responded, “I’ll keep you in suspense, okay?” At a rally the following day, he said, “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election—if I win.” On October 27, he told the crowd at a rally, “And just thinking to myself right now, we should just cancel the election and just give it to Trump, right? What are we even having it for?

Atal also wondered whether Indira Gandhi was mulling a presidential system for India and was planning to rule India with the army sharing power. He said, ‘[The] PM is glibly telling the world that there is no harm in having a national debate on the desirability of the presidential system. One wonders if the PM has any clear concept apart from perpetuating her family in power.

Only one aspect of the Vision resonated sharply throughout his first eight months in office. During the second presidential debate with Al Gore, on October 11, 2000, George W. Bush promised a less interventionist foreign policy than that of the Clinton-Gore administration – one, in keeping with his Responsibility Era, that would encourage self-reliance while curbing its own meddlesome Great Power Impulses. “I am worried,” Bush said then, “about over committing our military around the world. I want to be judicious in its use… I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build nations. Maybe I’m missing something here. I mean, we’re going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not. Our military is meant to fight and win war; that’s what its meant to do. And when it gets overextended, moreal drops… I’m going to be judicious as to how I use the military. It needed to be in our vital interest, the mission needs to be clear, and the exit strategy obvious.

Strangely enough, the least presidential moments of the visit persuaded some of the Post’s editors that Trump wasn’t putting on an act for them. Fred Hiatt, the paper’s editorial-page editor, had to ask, How could a man running for president justify going on a nationally televised debate and talking about the size of his penis?

On television and on the front pages of the major newspapers, Trump clearly seemed to be losing the election. Each new woman who came forward with charges of misbehavior became a focal point of coverage, coupled with Trump’s furious reaction, his ever darkening speeches, and the accompanying suggestion that they were dog whistles aimed at racists and anti-Semites. “Trump’s remarks,” one Washington Post story explained, summing up the media’s outlook, “were laced with the kind of global conspiracies and invective common in the writings of the alternative-right, white-nationalist activists who see him as their champion. Some critics also heard echoes of historical anti-Semitic slurs in Trump’s allegations that Clinton ‘meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty’ and that media and financial elites were part of a soulless cabal.” This outlook, which Clinton’s campaign shared, gave little consideration to the possibility that voters might be angry at large banks, international organizations, and media and financial elites for reasons other than their basest prejudices. This was the axis on which Bannon’s nationalist politics hinged: the belief that, as Marine Le Pen put it, “the dividing line is [no longer] between left and right but globalists and patriots.” Even as he lashed out at his accusers and threatened to jail Clinton, Trump’s late-campaign speeches put his own stamp on this idea. As he told one rally: “There is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship. From now on, it’s going to be ‘America first.’” Anyone steeped in Guénon’s Traditionalism would recognize the terrifying specter Trump conjured of marauding immigrants, Muslim terrorists, and the collapse of national sovereignty and identity as the descent of a Dark Age—the Kali Yuga. For the millions who were not familiar with it, Trump’s apocalyptic speeches came across as a particularly forceful expression of his conviction that he understood their deep dissatisfaction with the political status quo and could bring about a rapid renewal. Whether it was a result of Trump’s apocalyptic turn, disgust at the Clintons, or simply accuser fatigue—it was likely a combination of all three—the pattern of slippage in the wake of negative news was less pronounced in Trump’s internal surveys in mid-October. Overall, he still trailed. But the data were noisy. In some states (Indiana, New Hampshire, Arizona) his support eroded, but in others (Florida, Ohio, Michigan) it actually improved. When Trump held his own at the third and final debate on October 19, the numbers inched up further. The movement was clear enough that Nate Silver and other statistical mavens began to take note of it. “Is the Presidential Race Tightening?” he asked in the title of an October 26 article. Citing Trump’s rising favorability numbers among Republicans and red-state trend lines, he cautiously concluded that probably it was. By November 1, he had no doubt. “Yes, Donald Trump Has a Path to Victory” read the headline for his column that day, in which he

Donald Trump, whose signature contribution to political debate had been his relentless propagation of the lie that Barack Obama is not an American citizen, ran the most racist presidential campaign since the arch-segregationist George Wallace’s 1968 bid. While

It was the second presidential debate, and Donald Trump was looming behind me. Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage, and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces. It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled.

Even Senator Bernie Sanders recognized the possible consequences of such action. “What you’re really talking about is ending gun manufacturing in America,” he said with some hyperbole in a presidential debate with Clinton.

There was a revealing moment in the first presidential debate in September 2008, moderator Jim Lehrer asked the candidates, ‘‘Are you willing to acknowledge, both of this financial crisis is going to affect the way you rule the country as president of the States?’’Neither McCain nor Obama objected to Lehrer’s phrasing. Both, it seemed, perfectly comfortable with the idea that it’s the president’s job to ‘‘rule the country.

there are five things that mass consciousness does regularly that anchor you into the time-space continuum of 3D. The first four things are coffee in the morning, the news in the morning either via the newspaper or the television, the weather, and going to work at the same time. The fifth includes big sports events and other big televised events like the U.S. presidential debates or elections. You can probably think of other things that everyone “does.

Imagine how the last presidential campaign would have turned out if instead of the marketing circus that we were treated to, we were just given a weekly round table discussion between Bush, Gore, and Nader for a couple months running up to the election. No staged rallies, no TV images with flags flowing in the sunset, no pollsters. No marketing. Bush would have been luck to get two percent. (from an interview in Attitude, 2002)

The footage will be cut, spliced, and crafted to win the police officers' favor. What's happening here might come up in the next presidential debate for three minutes. But at its core, the struggles of the people of Baltimore will be nothing more than a talking point.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.

Liberals and conservatives actually move further apart when they read about research on whether the death penalty deters crime, or when they rate the quality of arguments made by candidates in a presidential debate, or when they evaluate arguments about affirmative action or gun control.39

By the end of the Eisenhower presidency, television had become inseparable from national politics and presidential campaigns. The average American household had owned a television set for less than ten years when, in 1960, Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Nixon faced off in the first-ever televised presidential debate. While the polio-afflicted FDR could not walk and Eisenhower was a less-than-charismatic speaker in public, the new visual medium granted no allowances. Starting with the debate, presidential elections were now a form of performance art in which every grimace, eye roll, and hand gesture counted toward the outcome—democracy subject to the rolling cameras of capitalism’s next big thing. •

One American political figure saw Russia for the growing menace that it was and was willing to call Putin out for his transgressions. During President Obama’s reelection campaign, Mitt Romney warned of a growing Russian strategic threat, highlighting their role as “our number one geopolitical foe.”[208] The response from President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and other Democrats was not to echo his sentiment, but actually to ridicule Romney and support the Russian government. President Obama hurled insults, saying Romney was “stuck in a Cold War mind warp” [209] and in a nationally televised debate mocked the former governor, saying “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back…” [210] When asked to respond to Romney’s comment, Secretary Clinton refused to rebuke the over-the-top and false Obama campaign attacks. Instead, she delivered a message that echoed campaign talking points arguing that skepticism of Russia was outdated: “I think it’s somewhat dated to be looking backwards,” she said, adding, “In many of the areas where we are working to solve problems, Russia has been an ally.”[211] A month after Secretary Clinton’s statement on Romney, Putin rejected Obama’s calls for a landmark summit.[212] He didn’t seem to share the secretary’s view that the two countries were working together. It was ironic that while Obama and Clinton were saying Romney was in a “Cold War mind warp,”[213] the Russian leader was waging a virulent, anti-America “election campaign” (that’s if you can call what they did in Russia an “election”). In fact, if anyone was in a Cold War mind warp, it was Putin, and his behavior demonstrated just how right Romney was about Russia’s intentions. “Putin has helped stoke anti-Americanism as part of his campaign emphasizing a strong Russia,” Reuters reported. “He has warned the West not to interfere in Syria or Iran, and accused the United States of ‘political engineering’ around the world.”[214] And his invective was aimed not just at the United States. He singled out Secretary Clinton for verbal assault. Putin unleashed the assault Nov. 27 [2011] in a nationally televised address as he accepted the presidential nomination, suggesting that the independent election monitor Golos, which gets financing from the United States and Europe, was a U.S. vehicle for influencing the elections here. Since then, Golos has been turned out of its Moscow office and its Samara branch has come under tax investigation. Duma deputies are considering banning all foreign grants to Russian organizations. Then Putin accused U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton of sending a signal to demonstrators to begin protesting the fairness of the Dec. 4 parliamentary elections.[215] [Emphasis added.] Despite all the evidence that the Russians had no interest in working with the U.S., President Obama and Secretary Clinton seemed to believe that we were just a Putin and Obama election victory away from making progress. In March 2012, President Obama was caught on a live microphone making a private pledge of flexibility on missile defense “after my election” to Dmitry Medvedev.[216] The episode lent credence to the notion that while the administration’s public unilateral concessions were bad enough, it might have been giving away even more in private. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Putin didn’t abandon his anti-American attitudes after he won the presidential “election.” In the last few weeks of Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, Putin signed a law banning American adoption of Russian children,[217] in a move that could be seen as nothing less than a slap in the face to the United States. Russia had been one of the leading sources of children for U.S. adoptions.[218] This disservice to Russian orphans in need of a home was the final offensive act in a long trail of human rights abuses for which Secretary Clinton failed to hold Russia accountable.

claims of reverse racism especially on topics of affirmative action allow majority group members (Whites) to turn the tables on their accusers by implying they are now the ones being discriminated against. Although this flies in the face of all economic, educational, and employment data (APA Presidential Task Force, 2012; J. M. Jones, 1997), the focus of the debate now becomes one of portraying White Americans as the victims.

Inside accounts of Presidential advisory groups make it clear that the failure to express dissent can have direct, immediate, and severe consequences...Because so much disagreement remains hidden, our beliefs are not properly shaped by healthy scrutiny and debate. The absence of such argument also leads us to exaggerate the extent to which other people believe the way we do. Bolstered by such a false sense of social support, our beliefs strike us as more resistant to subsequent logical and empirical challenge.

Presidential campaign observer Teddy White on the second Kennedy-Nixon debate in which the candidates spoke from separate television studios: "It was as if, separated by comments from his adversary, Richard Nixon was more at ease and could speak directly to the nation that lay between them.

When Pfizer was getting ready to launch their impotency drug Viagra or sildenafil citrate, they realized that the topic was taboo and would provoke intense debate if the drug was presented as a cure for impotency. Which old man would admit he was impotent, went the argument. So the business and markeing strategist decided to work on what may have been termed the ‘social justice’ angle of presenting the problem. Since impotency was seen as an almost terminal disease that could not be cured, was there a way of repositioning it by a change in terminology? A few years before Viagra was launched, the company started seeding media about a new problem facing American men, it was termed ‘Erectile Dysfunction’ or ED. I came across an article on ED in Fortune magazine a year or so before the official launch of Viagra. The company had managed to create a new disease which had an acronym that could be remembered by the lay consumer instead of the derogatory term in use till then, ‘impotence’. When the drug, and the brand Viagra, was finally launched, it found ready acceptance and went on to become a billion dollar seller that created a whole new industry. Even US Presidential contender Bob Dole appeared in a television commercial for Viagra. Unlike in India, where prescription-only brands are not allowed to be advertised on television and print media, in the US, even politicians are game for starring in television commercials. Viagra

In the 1992 presidential debate, third-party candidate Ross Perot famously warned about a 'giant sucking sound' of American jobs going south of the border to low-wage nations once trade protections were dropped. Perot was right, but no one in our government listened to him. Tariffs were ditched, and then Bill Clinton moved into the White House...He continued Reagan's trade policies and committed the United States to so-called free-trade agreements such as GATT, NAFTA, and the WTO, thus removing all the protections that had kept our domestic manufacturing industries safe from foreign corporate predators for two centuries.

Presidential candidates, inured to public debates, develop a readiness of repartee, a lively eloquence, and an uncanny way of gauging exactly the temper and mood of the audience. With these admirable abilities, they manage to shine by presenting ideas in the media that would never stand attentive, deliberate examination.

The variety of political positions shared on Facebook in the 2016 Presidential Election was both entertaining and, sadly, destructive. I observed friends of a lifetime divide into different camps and sacrifice their friendships through argument and debate. As an avid reader and political junkie, I had to hold myself back from expressing my opinions or presenting factual evidence which would obliterate others’ claims. Why would I jump into the fray? All it would do is hurt the friendship. Rarely does arguing political positions change an opinion or belief.

I was raised with strong values, and had spent much of my life to that point seeing my character tested. I was viciously bullied in middle school. My father died when I was a teenager. As a lawyer, I worked eighteen-hour days immersed in acrimony. As a cub reporter, I was targeted by a violent stalker. Once I became a well-known news anchor, I accepted without complaint the scrutiny that comes with that role. I’d also navigated my way through plenty of sexism from powerful men. So I suppose I was as prepared as anyone could be to spend the 2016 election being targeted by the likely Republican nominee. Yet still, the chaos Trump unleashed was of a completely different order than anything I’d encountered before—than anything any journalist has encountered at the hands of a presidential candidate in the history of modern American politics. This is the story of how I found myself on that debate stage, and how asking that question led to one of the toughest years of my life.

A FEW WEEKS before the first presidential debate at Hofstra University on Long Island, Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks who appears on Shark Tank, went on Fox Business and said that a Trump victory in November would cause the stock market to crash.

Then we caught the presidential debates. The people you folks elect are sort of scary. And you Americans are the folks that do it the best on this entire planet. Besides, your president only speaks for Americans. American movies speak for your world. Who hasn’t seen Wizard of Oz? Or Jaws? Or Star Wars?

Seeing a sloppy wet penis enter a sloppy wet vagina, from above, going in and out with the practiced tempo of professionals, strikes me as yet another drama for the ages I am meant only to witness, rather than learn from, like the Olympics or presidential debates.

Joe Biden himself, in a presidential debate, called them “an idea, not an organization.”[62] But that’s … not true. When I was in Philadelphia, it took me five minutes to google the local Antifa chapter’s website, where they were busily organizing to take pictures of people at Trump events and sending those pictures to the people’s employers, to get them fired for being white supremacists.

This is essentially a people's contest. On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men; to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuits for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life. Yielding to partial and temporary departures, from necessity, this is the leading object of the Government for whose existence we contend. I am most happy to believe that the plain people understand and appreciate this. It is worthy of note that while, in this the Government's hour of trial, large numbers of those in the army and navy who have been favored with the offices have resigned and proved false to the hand which

Even more telling was the Judicial Article’s silence on issues of judicial apportionment. The precise apportionment rules for the House, Senate, and presidential electors appeared prominently in the Legislative and Executive Articles. These rules reflected weeks of intense debate and compromise at Philadelphia and generated extensive discussion during the ratification process. Yet the Judicial Article said absolutely nothing about how the large and small states, Northerners and Southerners, Easterners and Westerners, and so on, were to be balanced on the Supreme Court. This gaping silence suggests that the Founding generation envisioned the Court chiefly as an organ enforcing federal statutes and ensuring state compliance with federal norms. Just as it made sense to give the political branches wide discretion to shape the postal service, treasury department, or any other federal agency carrying out congressional policy, so, too, it made sense to allow Congress and the president to contour the federal judiciary as they saw fit.

There was another way to look at it: The debates served to reinforce the public perceptions of Hillary and Trump. She was more presidential, totally establishment, and super-rehearsed. He embodied change—for good and for ill. He could be genuine while lying; she came off as inauthentic even when she was telling the truth.

Then we caught the presidential debates. The people you folks elect are sort of scary.

debate and decision. Congress itself was not, in his view, equipped with the expertise, the time, or the type of coherent organizational structure needed to formulate and initiate programs of action on a regular and systematically related basis. “Whenever my critics in the Congress talked to me about the responsibility of creating issues, I came back to the question of where in the hell they expected the issues to come from—from our heads? If an issue is not included in the presidential agenda, it is almost impossible—short of crisis—to get the Congress to focus on it. That’s the way our system works; but these fellows never understood that. They didn’t understand—with all their calls for Congress to have all sorts of expertise and classified information, in order to act in foreign affairs—that the congressional role in national security is not to act but to respond to the executive.”9

America, I never said this journey would be easy, and I won’t promise that now. Yes, our path is harder – but it leads to a better place. Yes our road is longer – but we travel it together. We don’t turn back. We leave no one behind. We pull each other up. We draw strength from our victories, and we learn from our mistakes...

14. He’s denied climate change. Then denied that he denied it.​​ Here’s Trump calling global warming a conspiracy created by the Chinese: The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. @realDonaldTrump – 11:15 AM – 6 Nov 2012 More tweets of him calling global warming a hoax… NBC News just called it the great freeze – coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX? @realDonaldTrump – 3:48 PM – 25 Jan 2014 This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice @realDonaldTrump – 4:39 PM – 1 Jan 2014 Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee – I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax! @realDonaldTrump – 7:13 AM – 6 Dec 2013 Then, during a presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump denied that he said any of this. Here’s the video. Clinton says, “Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax, perpetrated by the Chinese. I think it’s real.” Trump interrupts to say, “I do not say that. I do not say that.” Actually, Donald, you’ve said nothing else. Trump has also said, dozens of times in tweets like this, that global warming sounds like a great idea: It’s freezing and snowing in New York–we need global warming! @realDonaldTrump – 11:24 AM – 7 Nov 2012 Here he is hating wind turbines: It’s Friday. How many bald eagles did wind turbines kill today? They are an environmental & aesthetic disaster. @realDonaldTrump – 12:55 PM – 24 Aug 2012 Trump fought against a “really ugly” offshore wind farm in Scotland because it would mar the view from his Scottish golf resort. My new club on the Atlantic Ocean in Ireland will soon be one of the best in the World – and no-one will be looking into ugly wind turbines! @realDonaldTrump – 5:24 AM – 14 Feb 2014

These presidential debates are in essence sixty-second pitched battles, and slow starts are seldom rewarded with come-from-behind victories.

A live debate or interview with politicians is like entering a courtroom. Never flippantly throw out a question without understanding the background, and be prepared to offer more details.

Equally worrisome was the way Trump used information from Russian affiliated sites on the campaign trail. We didn’t think it was necessarily nefarious. He just amplified evidence to buttress a viewpoint, however wild or incredible, that he wanted to insert into the debate. But it troubled us that he was willing to use what amounted to Russian disinformation in pursuit of those ends. The information wasn’t coming from CNN or FOX. It was coming from places like RT and Sputnik. Outlets that were clearly closely affiliated with Russia. Similarly, we knew that WIKILEAKS had released material that the Russian government had stolen from the DNC and the Clinton campaign. By late summer 2016, the public did too, thanks to reports in the press. But Trump and his campaign, didn’t seem to care. The stolen material was helpful to them and he mentioned it, a lot. Over the course of 2016, Trump made reference to WIKILEAKS over 135 times on the campaign trail. From a counterintelligence perspective, it was problematic that a presidential candidate would use material stolen by a hostile foreign adversary for his own political gain. From a patriotic perspective, I wasn’t just worried about a candidate relying on actors outside the US to help his presidential prospects, I was repulsed.

Or take the case of Ron Paul during the 2012 presidential primary. During a debate on American foreign policy, Congressman Paul said, “If another country does to us what we do to others, we’re not going to like it very much. So I would say that maybe we ought to consider a ‘Golden Rule’ in foreign policy. Don’t do to other nations what we don’t want to have them do to us.” The crowd booed.