Tunku Varadarajan, Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Fellow in Journalism at the Hoover Institution, offers his take on last night's New York gubernatorial debate (?) at the Daily Beast. The whole thing was a total mess, but one thing's for sure: Paladino's done.
This was not a debate in the conventional sense: There were too many talking heads competing for airtime for a back-and-forth between candidates to have been feasible. Instead, they answered questions for 90 minutes—dealing directly with the moderators and questioners in the audience, and not with each other. As such, it was a series of 90-second vignettes—vignettes that quickly grew dull over time.
There can be no question that after this debate, Paladino is over: finito. He was fidgety, furrow-faced, almost entirely unsmiling, and largely inarticulate. The Republican Party’s candidate, it is remarkable to relate, even sounded less impressive at times than Ms. Davis the ex-madam, who uttered the zinger of the evening. Describing what would happen if the state didn’t reduce its burdens on entrepreneurship, she said, “Businesses will leave the state quicker than Carl Paladino at a gay bar.” (Later, in addressing a question on the Metropolitan Transport Authority, she said, “The difference between the MTA and my escort service is that I kept just one set of books and delivered reliable and on-time service.”)
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