Clinton, accidentally, ended up spending a lot of time preparing for just this format this very year when she took part in a handful of debates against her one serious challenger: Bernie Sanders. She also ran for the US Senate and one-on-one against Barack Obama for months of the 2008 primary. And this showed throughout performance choices both made in the debate.
For instance, when there’s a two-person debate, the networks customarily keep both onscreen the full time. (In the Republican debates, Trump often only had to share space with a news ticker.) And where Trump’s reality show turns work really well in those wider shots — probably thanks to The Apprentice, where he’s most often held in a mid-shot that allows for his frequent gestures to land — they don’t work in the much tighter shots used in this debate. [...]
In contrast, Clinton’s dream outcome for the night was essentially to bait Trump into responding to her attacks on him, thereby making the debate all about him. (In a debate where both candidates have low favorability ratings, both are essentially trying to make the election about how much voters don’t like their opponent.) When he couldn’t resist taking her up on her invitations, he ended up playing exactly into the narrative she wanted to lay out: He can’t be trusted to stand firm.
I don’t want to overstate Clinton’s performance here. She was too canned in places, and it was all too obvious when she was reciting a line she had worked on in her debate prep. But it was also obvious that she knew, on some level, what she was doing and she had come prepared to do the job. It’s almost like a meta-commentary on both campaigns, expressed in 90 minutes of live television.
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