Graded against his own curve, Donald Trump did all right in the debate Sunday night.
But his curve dips to subterranean levels. Your child's "D-minus" at semester seems an accomplishment if the lad was carrying a confirmed "F" at midterm.
For her part, Hillary Clinton, a "C" student in this race, which is good enough, invoked Muhammad Ali as one of the good Muslims. Then she mostly played a version of Ali's rope-a-dope.
By that I mean she let Trump punch himself out with huffy and petulant charges and didn't try to correct his every misstatement--for there wasn't nearly enough time for all that, and, anyway, the fact-checkers would do the work for her post-debate.
Mostly, though, the country was treated to a demeaning spectacle that pleased the hardened bases of the two polarizing and detested candidates and left everyone else resigned or despairing.
Trump repeatedly called Clinton names and spewed shallow and harsh rhetoric. Clinton opened by saying Trump was unfit for the presidency and then, comically, not five minutes later, faulted him for going low while crediting herself with going high.
Trump skulked around and said she had much hate in her heart.
She dared to invoke Abraham Lincoln in answer to why she made a private speech to Goldman Sachs and said politicians had to make different statements in public and private.
Thus she likened Abe's brave calculus to get slave emancipation into the Constitution with her chumming up to Wall Street when on Wall Street, and deploring Wall Street when with Bernie Sanders.
They're not remotely similar. It offends sensibilities and American history to assert that they are. And Trump's best moment was when he managed to react deftly and call her on the nonsense.
A couple of good rules of thumb: Don't go near comparing your opponent to Hitler and don't go near comparing yourself to Lincoln.
The effectiveness of Clinton's rope-a-dope strategy was predicated on the extent of Trump's dopiness.
He was less dopey than in the first debate. Thus her victory was less pronounced than in the first contest, though a victory nonetheless.
There were two scientific post-debate polls asking which of the candidates won. In CNN's, Clinton was deemed the victor by 57-34. In YouGov's, she was seen as the winner by 47-42. Trump supporters, bless their hearts, were claiming victory again based on nonsensical call-in polls.
Clinton got better the further the debate moved from challenges on the emails, a deserved burden for her. Her stretch-run riffs about her pride and accomplishments in 30 years of public service--which I suppose credits her with public service for being married to a public servant--were moderately engaging and uplifting.
Trump got worse as the subject matter turned to foreign policy, where he says odd and frightful things.
Crazily, he's still defending Russia, saying we don't know who hacked our computers when, in fact, our government has confirmed it was the Russians who hacked our computers, and, at that, Russians tied to the Russian government.
Post-debate, the best talking-head analysis I heard came, per usual, from Steve Schmidt, the veteran Republican operative who managed John McCain's presidential run and ended up feuding with, and never forgiving himself for helping to pick, the original Trump, by whom I mean Sarah Palin.
Schmidt's formulation of the race is that the choice is between the two most unpopular presidential nominees in the nation's history, and the loser thus will be the one getting the most attention.
That's a smarter and clearer way of expressing the formulation that I've tried to put forth, which is that the race comes down to whether Trump can behave normally enough to be an acceptable agent of the dramatic change the country wants, or remains seen as too outrageous and risky.
The latter is the prevailing situation at present, because Trump is getting most of the attention.
His thinking Sunday night in bringing into the debate hall those women tied to alleged Bill Clinton sex scandals was to try to turn attention to Hillary as an enabler who abused those women herself by slandering them to protect her husband's, and thus her own, political career.
It didn't work. It looked equal parts mean, desperate, irrelevant, petulant and cheapening to our political dialogue. Trump is winning only when Clinton is hemming and hawing over emails.
The race is probably in the bag for Hillary unless she collapses in the third debate and Donald, with a fresh Tic Tac, saves her with hands-free mouth-to-mouth.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 10/11/2016