Debate Analysis Sounded a Little Fishy to Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi thinks the next-day analysis of the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris sounded suspiciously familiar. Over and over, headlines and pundits argued that Harris "baited" Trump into traps or that she "commanded" the night, he writes in his Racket News column. What he finds fishy is that the Democratic Party put out a press release emphasizing those two phrases. "As one of the last relics of the 'Boys on the Bus' era, I don't recall campaign messaging being this crude, or politicians, press, and audience acting so overtly as a chorus," writes Taibbi. The "DNC or RNC just backing up to the commentariat, dumping loads of phrases, and seeing them instantly converted to conventional wisdom, that's new."

At New York, Jonathan Chait finds the theory flawed. For one thing, the Democratic release quoted journalists who already had weighed in. The problem for Trump is that "many observers, witnessing the debate, had more or less the same impression." That seems more reasonable than the idea that Democrats "secretly instructed a wide array of journalists what to say happened," he writes. What's more, plenty of Republicans used the same verbiage. "He rose to the bait repeatedly," said Brit Hume on Fox. And betting markets, an objective gauge if ever there were one, started moving in Harris' direction as the debate was unfolding, he notes. (Read Taibbi's column here, and Chait's rebuttal here.)