After the
build-up and the expectation, after the predicted TV audience of 100 million, after the soundbites and the fury, the test to determine who will become the next president of the United States came down to what all exams pretty much come down to these days. The clever girl, believing she could never be quite good enough, did huge amounts of revision and triumphed, while the
cocky, lazy boydecided to wing it. Because whatever the boy did would be awesome, right?
Oh dear, Donald, oh dear. See me after class.
Put it this way, if you are reduced to yelling “I HAVE A GREAT TEMPERAMENT”, then you probably don’t.
Let’s also concede that, while Hillary Clinton clearly won by a mile, calm, diligent females outperforming loud, attention-disordered males
does not necessarily translate into success in the real world, which sadly still fears the former and rewards the latter.
The first of three 95-minute
presidential debates set different challenges according to the gender of the candidate. For a start, women have to think about so much more than men prior to a big occasion, don’t we? Hair, clothes and make-up take a week’s worth of worry each. Hillary, who could neither look too feminine nor too masculine, opted for a cherry trouser-suit whose plain, round-necked style placed her sartorially somewhere between a Beefeater and the Starship Enterprise. (Phasers set to stun.)
Clinton is ten inches shorter than Trump and red lent her valuable impact. Full marks to the make-up artist who managed to give what must be a very weary 69-year-old a fresh yet sophisticated look with a new, denser arc to the eye-liner.
If you think this is demeaning trivia, imagine what social media would have to say about Clinton the Crone if she
didn’t make an effort. Donald Trump only had to put a suit on, although I noticed they had taken his raucous, popcorn-yellow hair down several notches to a soothing, statesmanlike mink.
Going into the debate, Trump had a
very low bar to step over. Basically, all he had to do was prove to voters he was not a crazy moron, not ridicule a disabled Hispanic person in the audience or display any of his famous anger-management issues.
Hillary had a much bigger mountain to climb. She had to show that she was Trump’s superior in knowledge, experience and self-control, without appearing in any way superior. As a New York editor once explained to me, there is a powerful, “know-nothing” strain in
American culture which regards the overly articulate with deep suspicion. There’s a reason why so many movie legends are men of few words. Think of John Wayne’s “Warrrhhhhlll”, a drawl that could contain at least 13 syllables, and you realise why a Yale-educated female lawyer making a point a minute might be hated rather than admired.
As Stephen Eric Bronner points out in his book The Bigot: Why Prejudice Persists, sexism has not gone away in the 21st century; it has merely morphed into something more complex and slyly camouflaged. So it’s possible to have a country where a woman can both be a presidential candidate and be suspectbecause she is a presidential candidate.
To be fair, Trump did well for the first 20 minutes, which is to say he did what his handlers told him to. He was disciplined, he didn’t yell or interrupt himself with strange non-sequiturs, like a drunk who has fallen asleep on a bar stool and suddenly wakes with a start. He was mock-gracious to Hillary, asking permission to call her Secretary Clinton (“Is that OK? Yes? I want you to be happy…”), and he
landed some decent blows when he kept to his theme that America had been failed by a political class represented by Clinton and was in need of a dealmaker leader like himself.
The trouble is that inside Donald Trump lurks a bumptious, nine-year-old bully who can’t wait to get out and start tripping up the weaker kids for fun. Presidential Donald can only keep the lid on Dastardly Donald (Horrid Henry’s Yankee cousin) for so long before he starts pulling faces and sneering – and this is a direct quote from last night – “I’m going to cut taxes big league, and you are going to raise taxes big league”.
On the campaign trail, with ecstatic supporters in attendance, when Trump starts spouting his weird word salad, he regains focus by shouting: “We’re gonna build a HUGE WALL!” But in last night’s debate, with an invited audience bidden to keep quiet and deprived of his echo chamber, his incoherence was deafening.
How did
Hillary keep it together in the face of Donald’s grammatical atrocities and sweeping ignorance? She smiled a lot. Too much. It was obviously a tactic, designed to cast her as the stoic, capable adult dealing with an impossible child. (Every mother will recognise that strained, fixed smile of hers, twitching at the corners.)
A coach has helped her to lower the voice, just as Margaret Thatcher did, so she never came across as shrill, but that has limited her dynamic range, her ability to seem exciting. Instead, she plugged away patiently, setting out her policy stall, showing that she was the kind of sober, rational person who could be trusted to navigate a country through tough times – and the sniffing jerk opposite was none of those things.
Trump, who was
rapidly losing the plot of his own sentences, handed Hillary gift after gift. When she quoted him saying, back in 2006, that he hoped for a housing collapse because it would offer him a chance to buy cheap, he retorted: “That’s called business, by the way.” Hillary shot back with the fact that five million people lost their homes during Trump’s exciting business opportunity. Oof!
While Donald failed to make anything stick on Hillary’s 33,000 deleted emails, she had him pinned to the wall over his failure to release his tax returns. “Maybe he’s not as rich as he claims to be,” she goaded. An indignant Trump seemed to concede that he paid no federal income tax, and, moreover, if he hadn’t, “that makes me smart”. Unlike all those poor schmucks who do.
Scenting blood,
Clinton chided her rivalfor his sexism. “This is a man who has called women pigs, slobs and dogs. And someone who has said pregnancy is an inconvenience.” It was the bravest thing she did all night.
Privately, she knows being female makes her strong, but in this, the biggest test of her life, it is seen as her greatest weakness.
Only once did the clever girl who revised mock the lazy boy who winged it. “I think Donald just criticised me for preparing for this debate,” said Hillary mischievously. “And, yes, I did. And you know what else I prepared for. I prepared to be president, and that’s a good thing.”It sure is. As she aims for the top job in the world, Hillary Clinton is the very first, alone of all her sex. You know, I was scared for her last night, scared for all women at what might happen to her, but I needn’t have worried. Ten inches shorter, she towered over her rival. In 42 days’ time, Dastardly Donald deserves to get beaten by the girl who prepared.
By Allison Pearson
