When the first presidential debate in 1984 ended, I walked across the stage to shake Ronald Reagan’s hand. I had been one of three media questioners. Reagan looked stricken. He was fully aware how poorly he had done. Walter Mondale had outperformed him.
“A lot of supporters tried to make me feel better afterward,” Reagan wrote in his autobiography, An American Life. “But I knew I’d stumbled two or three times while millions of people were watching, and I was embarrassed.”
After losing decisively to Hillary Clinton last week in the first presidential debate of 2016, Donald Trump was not so self-aware. He talked about meaningless Internet polls that showed him winning. He recounted the enthusiastic reaction of people he encountered.
Two days later, he was still pointing to the Internet polls, which are neither random nor scientific and aren’t taken seriously by pollsters or politicians. “I think we’re doing very well,” he told Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. Even with millions in ads against him, he said, “I guess
I’m leading.”
Trump can recover from the first debate when he confronts Clinton on October 9 in the second of their three nationally televised debates. Losing the first debate isn’t fatal to a candidate so long as he comes to grips with what went wrong and commits to taking a new approach.
Three candidates have done exactly that. Reagan was tight and anxious to show his knowledge of issues in the first debate, then relaxed in the second and triumphed. George W. Bush underestimated John Kerry, who gained six percentage points in their first clash, but didn’t again and steadied his candidacy. Barack Obama kissed off the opening debate with Mitt Romney, but got tough the next time.
A Trump recovery won’t be as easy. Reagan, Bush, and Obama had the advantage of being sitting presidents who were leading their challengers. Their leads shrank, but they bounced back with reassuring performances in the second debate.
For Trump, the success of his campaign rides on what he does to fix his debate style. He cannot afford another embarrassment. Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia suggested Trump might suffer because last week’s debate was the first time he’d been “engaged in a one-on-one debate.” Indeed, he did. Clinton had been in five such debates this year with Bernie Sanders and four with Obama in 2008. Her experience showed.
After a debate, I’m told, Trump likes to spin the outcome as a success, whether it was or not. When that wears off and gleams of self-awareness begin to break through, he moves on to repair his campaign. In the weeks before the debate, he had done this. It put him in a position to defeat Clinton.
Trump’s instincts are not much help in retaking lost ground. If he again responds reflexively to every dig that Clinton takes at him, he’ll lose more ground. He vowed to attack Clinton more vigorously than ever in the second debate. That probably won’t help either.
Here’s the key question: Does Trump know the difference between an issue that helps his campaign and one that doesn’t? He’s often inclined to give extra attention to things like a former Miss Universe. He told Fox’s O’Reilly he didn’t have “much” to say about the beauty queen, then talked at length about her.
But what about issues that voters, in poll after poll, say are of real concern to them—the economy, jobs, taxes, immigration, health care? Trump has resisted stressing them. If he doesn’t talk them up in the next debate, it will shortly be too late.
Trump mentioned his economic plan briefly last week without explaining why it would generate private investment, growth, and jobs, and Clinton’s plan won’t. Her claim that economists think her proposal—more spending, higher taxes—will produce growth is evidence that some economists wear ideological blinders.
Strong, sustainable economic growth is a subject with a powerful appeal today. Government simply cannot produce it, as we’ve learned during the Obama years. Only the private sector can. That’s the way the economic world works.
President Kennedy learned this the hard way. He faced a recession when he took office in 1961. His economic advisers prescribed pumped-up spending as the remedy, but it failed to stimulate growth. In 1962, he changed course on the advice of his Republican Treasury secretary, Douglas Dillon, and proposed deep cuts in income tax rates.
The Kennedy cuts had two results. They touched off an economic boom in the mid-to-late 1960s. And they became the model for the Reagan tax cuts of 1981, which also led to a surge in economic growth.
Why Trump hasn’t linked his tax plan to JFK’s is a mystery. Larry Kudlow, who drafted Trump’s plan along with Steve Moore, is the author of a new book on Kennedy’s cuts, JFK and the Reagan Revolution. It would be an easy point for the candidate to make.
Trump seemed to think candidates in presidential debates are required to answer the moderator’s questions. But a few words will do and candidates are free to turn to any issue of their choosing—immigration, for instance. Lester Holt, the first debate’s moderator, never mentioned it, but Trump could have.
Immigration “has now disappeared from the news,” says John Hinderaker of Power Line. Holt didn’t raise it because “Democrats understand that most voters side with Trump.” They agree on other issues Trump may need to inject into next week’s debate, Hinderaker suggests, including the Iran deal, Clinton’s mishandling of classified information, stagnant wages, rising crime, the war on cops, Obamacare, and the Libya fiasco.
Reagan had crammed for his first debate. He concluded he had been “overtrained.” He decided to do less studying for the second debate. “It was a good thing I didn’t,” he wrote in his autobiography. He was relaxed, told a famous joke, and won.
“Your mind just isn’t flexible enough if it’s saturated with facts,” Reagan wrote in his autobiography. But that wasn’t Trump’s problem. In the second debate, a few facts bolstering a few strong points would help.
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
