What I liked and disliked about the "debate"

[struggle4progress]

It's great when our side can work together. I like that. It's going to take some dedicated team work to beat Mr Orange-Tan next year. I like people who can play well with others

I dislike it when our side bickers and snipes at each other. You can spend all day trying to get your message out, but if there's a 30 second spit-spat, that's what the evening news will cover

This is not rocket surgery. We need people who can come together and stay on point. We can win but it will take disciplined hard work. There's no guarantee. There's no magic. Positive thinking is necessary but it's not nearly the full story. We need a working machine, and we won't ever build it if we spend time throwing gravel in the gears of today's prototypes

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. What I don't like about these "debates" in general

is that they don't really give us a measure of a candidate's qualities indicating he/she would be a good president. All the candidates can do is show off their skills at coming up with facile answers, quick retorts and memorized sound bites, which the media then tell us what we ought to think about the candidates' answers. And it's meaningless. The candidates are criticized for talking too much about Trump or not talking about him enough; being too wonky and detailed or too general and vague; for bashing each other too much or not challenging each other enough; for interrupting too much or being too passive; for being either too rambling and discursive or not explaining enough - and all analyses are offered under the offerer's unstated but discernible bias.

A good debater might not be a good president, or vice versa. A good president will have certain qualities that a facile debater might not have, and that in any event can't be discerned during a debate, especially one as constrained as these TV specials. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin, the essential qualities are "humility, empathy, resilience, courage; the ability to replenish energy, listen to diverse opinions, control negative impulses, connect with all manner of people, communicate through stories and keep one’s word." https://www.history.com/topics/doris-kearns-goodwin-on-presidential-leadership We should not base our decisions solely or even substantially on a candidate's debate performance because we can't learn whether a candidate has those qualities from their minutes-long discourses on a pre-selected question. We might get hints but that's it. I think we place too much weight on these events.