Montini: If truth mattered, Clinton crushed Trump (Hint: Truth doesn’t matter)
When people talk about scoring points in a presidential debate they don’t mean a candidate made an insightful or salient point.
No.
They're talking about style, about a silly and often pre-written ‘zinger’ (usually without much zing). They’re not talking about accuracy or acumen.
Americans love games.
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Politics is our most important game. Presidential politics is the Super Bowl.
And we score it completely on style points. With no guidelines for exactly what style means. (Of maybe we score like the Russian judges in the old Olympics.)
If this was football it would be like saying that a one-handed catch – out of bounds – was more important than a simple post route executed for a touchdown.
What the fact checks told us
There was plenty of fact-checking during the first Clinton-Trump debate.
The various fact-checkers aimed to determine whether the candidates were accurate in what they said and truthful in what they said about the other candidate.
In all of the fact checks I looked at Clinton crushed Trump.
I was following along on the PolitiFact website, well-known for its cold, clear fact checking.
I stopped keeping score with Clinton ahead by something like 17-8.
Meaning what?
OUR VIEW:Clinton took down a national bully
GOODYKOONTZ:Well, that debate was nuts
Well, among other things, it means Trump wasn’t truthful when he said he never supported the war in Iraq. He did. That Trump was wrong when he said Clinton started the “birther” controversy.
That Clinton was truthful when she said, "This is a man who has called women pigs, slobs and dogs.” (And he wasn’t just talking about Rosie O’Donnell.)
On the other hand, Trump was correct in pointing out that Clinton flip-flopped on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal.
Check for yourself. Lots of organizations did fact checks. It was a pretty lopsided score.
But only if truth mattered. If facts mattered. But they don’t. Not in this particular game. Our most important game.
They don’t.
