Individual-1 can’t stand not being the center of attention despite Jay Inslee’s declaration that Trump was the “greatest national security threat”. Round Two of the debates should be more raucous tonight.
No wonder he was bored. So bored we’ll ignore his meetings with Putin at the G20.
THERE WERE PLENTY OF ISSUES with the first round of Democratic debates. NBC had live-streaming lag issues and a hot mic problem involving two of the debate moderators meant they could be heard talking after they left the stage, a gaffe that repeatedly interrupted Chuck Todd when he was trying to ask Elizabeth Warren a question about gun control. But the biggest problem by far was one that was abundantly obvious before the debates even happened: Too many candidates—ten of them, to be specific, so many that every shot of the stage by definition had to be a fish-eye lens shot—and not enough time. Sixty seconds to answer a question and 30 seconds for a follow-up was barely enough time to string together a few sentences and look sternly into the camera, let alone make a substantial statement.
The result was also fairly predictable: Lots of shouting and interrupting (mostly by New York mayor Bill de Blasio) and repeated pleas of “your time is up” from the moderators, as the candidates continued trying to belabor their favorite point. And the difficulty of keeping track of all the people running (a problem compounded by the fact that “super” credits identifying the candidates showed up late and in some cases were completely missing) was compounded by the fact that there were arguably too many moderators as well—three of them (Lester Holt, Savannah Guthrie and Telemundo’s José Díaz-Balart) asked questions during the first half of the program, and then another two (Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow) performed the same function during the second half.
MSM is grasping for media frames, but we’ll see them soon enough.
These are the first signs that other media elements are at work for 2020: