On Friday, I mentioned to Bobbi that, taken together, the optics on Thursday night's "Town Halls" looked terrible.
After the goat rope of the first debate, Trump's bout with the 'Rona, and the refusal of the administration to accede to a virtual debate where a third party could presumably control the mics, I initially feared that Thursday night would feature both candidates retreating to private hugboxes. It somehow managed to be worse.
NBC sent law school grad, former NBC legal reporter and White House reporter, Savannah Guthrie to their Town Hall, and she was apparently attempting to atone for fellow network employee Chuck Todd's notoriously milquetoast interviewing style. She went after the president aggressively, and he gleefully swung back and it made for interesting television.
Meanwhile, ABC sat former Clinton administration senior advisor and Democratic White House Communications Coordinator George Stephanopoulos down for a collegial chat with former Vice President Joe Biden in a setting that looked like a play in a small school theater or maybe a sparsely attended university lecture hall.
Last night, NBC themselves confirmed that I wasn't the only one to come away with that impression.
I don't know what the ratings were yet, but if the WWF match didn't outdraw the Sominex commercial, I'd be shocked. Since POTUS is bigly into TV ratings, if he loses next month, watch for comparison of the two programs viewerships to get trotted out as proof of chicanery by the faithful. People seem to forget that TV ratings, like Google Analytics, don't distinguish between hate views and love views.
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