Right brain versus left brain,
gut versus any part of the brain at all.
Instinct versus experience,
and of course, at the most primal level,
woman versus man.
and watch their body language,
watch how they react.
There's a long, long saga of
the images from debates mattering
more than anything else.
When John Kennedy and Richard Nixon debated,
"Only you can decide what you want this country to be."
John Kennedy, in an elegant dark suit,
he was a remarkably handsome person who was at his
handsome best, and poor Nixon,
he was wearing this horrible, sort of light-colored
light gray suit with a matching gray tie,
he was sweaty, he looked like hell.
This year will be more unusual than most.
The most useful visual cue was a famous
WWE clip between Trump and Vince McMahon.
There was a bet and Trump's wrestler won
and he took Vince McMahon into the ring,
put his head in a headlock,
and shaved his head in something that you could only
see as sort of a prison-style emasculation.
And any viewer that sees that clip, and then goes back
and watches the Republican primary debates,
will see the same impulse of
domination and humiliation.
In a ten-person debate, it's like a giant panel show,
everybody is scrambling for airtime.
So he stood up there taller than everybody else
except Jeb Bush who held himself in a slouch,
and he could look down on Little Marco and
and Chubby Chris and Lying Ted and all the rest of these people,
he won that primal battle for airtime, he then could tune out,
and go into hibernation almost,
when the topic turned to things that didn't interest him.
And that allowed him to win.
What's fascinating is the contrast between
what got him here, and what lies ahead
in these head-to-head presidential debates.
Domination and humiliation.
It's much harder to do against a woman who
arguably is at her best when being attacked by men.
The Benghazi hearings,
"Would you want to talk to the author of that email?"
Hillary Clinton with a "Bring it on boys,"
expression on her face just batted back
these insulting questions from Trey Gowdy
and the other members of the commission.
"The witness you're referring to did appear before Congress,"
"That was not my point, my point-"
The dynamic that was so successful for Trump
in the primaries may be exactly the one that would
cause him problems in the head-to-head debates.
Another aspect, in multi-player debates,
the time seems to go very quickly.
You're trying to get your hand up,
to get the teacher to recognize you to have your say.
In head-to-head debates you have to fill 2 minutes
on how you're going to create jobs,
or how you're going to deal with the Middle East,
or how you're going to deal with nuclear weapons.
And once you get through
you then have to have the 2nd and 3rd and 5th and 10th
sentence backing it up and Trump has never done that.
No one could shore up a lack of policy knowledge at age 70,
and certainly not Donald Trump.
The way she could lose this debate is slugging insult for insult.
"Crooked Hillary, crooked Hillary."
But she only made a couple of mistakes
over the decades of her debate practice.
"She's as crooked as they come."
She's always competent, bullet-proof,
answers the questions, makes her points,
is on message,
and that's I think the implied message she has
for becoming president.
The presidential debates are one chance
that people get to see in real time
unscripted, the two candidates face to face,
and you never really know what's going to happen.
This year in particular,
it's hard to imagine how this debate will not really matter.