Traveling to Mexico City to meet one-on-one with the camarón chauvinist, President Enrique Peña Nieto, is nothing compared to the high-stakes negotiation facing Donald Trump today. The commissars on presidential debates have made their moderator selections and these hanging judges make Gonzalo Curiel look like a friend of the family.
The moderation panel is composed of four Democrats and one journalist.
The Democrats include NBC anchor Lester Holt, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, ABC’s Martha Raddatz and CBS’ Elaine Quijano.
Evidently four tokens were enough, because the last slot went to Fox News’ Chris Wallace.
Yet for some bizarre reason, Trump claims to be happy with the “journalists” and is ready to attend his three debates.
If only the commissars had made Khizr Khan one of the group, Trump might be roused to defend himself.
Not fighting for a more equitable ideological distribution among the moderators is a huge tactical mistake. This election will be won among independent voters. Winning the debates — absent Hillary suffering a coughing-induced seizure — will go a long way toward persuading independent voters that Trump is presidential.
Spending 90 minutes on the defensive answering questions designed to make him look bad will finish the Trump campaign.
It’s time for a reversal. If Trump can get away with forgetting to pick up the check for financing his campaign, he can get away with changing his mind on moderators. He needs to insist that one of the remaining slots be a conservative on the order of Hugh Hewitt or Dennis Prager.
Adding either of these individuals won’t mean the moderator will go easy on Trump — he was quite put out with Hewitt during an early primary debate — it will mean the questions and the agenda will not be based on a big government perspective.
Take the first debate. Lester Holt is a given, even though Holt peddles the lie that Trump called Mexican “immigrants” rapists, there is no way Trump can object to a black moderator.
Holt will make sure Hillary has a chance to showcase her compassion while he asks Donald when he’s going to start beating his wife.
Trump will be hit for “divisive” rhetoric, while Hillary gets a pass on telling coal miners she’s going to put them out of work.
If Trump escapes this debate looking temperamentally qualified it counts as a win.
Instead Trump should concentrate on adding a conservative to the Town Hall in October and subtracting one of the leftists. These “voice of the people” events are problematic for Republicans since the questions are always “when will government help me pay for college, abort my baby, bail out my underwater mortgage, care for my child or guarantee I won’t be returned to my native land?”
Any candidate who believes in individual responsibility automatically gets to wear the Scrooge hat.
Right now we have Martha Raddatz who was so close to Barack Obama she invited him to her wedding — the fact Hillary attended the Trump daughter’s wedding doesn’t cancel this out — then after the reception, Obama appointed her husband to the FCC.
Raddatz has also called Hillary “cool,” “trending,” “glamorous,” and popular.
If Hillary had been at her wedding, Raddat, might have asked to help Clinton make it up the stairs to the debate platform.
Anderson Cooper, the whiter-than-white host, is a typical disingenuous “journalist.”
When he’s not functioning as a gay activist, he’s using research from a leftist feelings tank to attack Mitt Romney’s tax plan and employing a vulgarity on the air to attack members of the tea party.
Plus, he already had one run-in when Trump told him, “People don’t trust you, and they don’t trust the media.”
It goes without saying that with Raddatz and Cooper picking questions, there will be at least one about the wall Trump plans to build to defend the border, but none about Hillary’s failure to defend Benghazi.
Adding a conservative will potentially mean some of the worst questions won’t make the broadcast because he will be part of the selection team. We might even get a question that addresses religious liberty, tax cuts, term limits, or federalism.
Although your guess is as good as mine as to how Trump will answer the latter.
Trump may be thinking it doesn’t matter who the moderators are because he’s just the man to take them on. That’s another error. Independent’s won’t like it if Trump is fighting everyone on the stage. There’s a limit of one opponent per customer and Hillary is the opponent that’s on the ballot.
Michael R. Shannon is a commentator, researcher (for the League of American Voters), and an award-winning political and advertising consultant with nationwide and international experience. He is author of "Conservative Christian’s Guidebook for Living in Secular Times (Now with added humor!)." Read more of Michael Shannon's reports — Go Here Now.
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