I'm Christopher Leiden and this is open source in our very own post-debate

spinroom taking the measure of Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and of ourselves as

the voters they were pitching.

Did we get what we expected?

Did we get what we wanted?

Pinton O'Toole on the line from Ireland is our guest and guide.

He's much admired now for his TART reporting

on American life in the New York Review of Books.

Pinton O'Toole built his reputation

as a theater critic in Dublin and to this day in New York.

I'm asking him to review our presidential debate this week as live drama.

You know, a strange image came into my head, Chris, I was thinking in this debate, what we really got was a kind of barabating show in which the drama lay effectively in the fact that you had one person on stage who was Kamala Harris, who was pretty good at poking the bear.

And you had Trump who was kind of tethered to his podium and couldn't help

taking the bait you know couldn't help being goaded into just being the worst self that he is, you know, setting off on rant after rant.

And as a spectacle, I think it was riveting, I certainly found myself very much absorbed in it but one of the things you would hope for from higher class drama is some kind of deeper revelation.

I don't think we got that. I saw him at the start trying to restrain himself and I could see his coaches tearing their hair as he went into rent mode and then could never get out of it.

I don't think Kamala Harris was particularly brilliant, you know, but the fact that she didn't really need to be, what she

needed to be clever about was just poking the bear and hoping that you were going to get these kind of increasingly incoherent roars coming back from the beast.

And he played into her scenario in ways that, as you saying I imagine Trump's advisors must have

been just completely horrified by it because it meant that she was setting the terms

all the time I don't know how you feel about this but it

also seems to me that as well as being kind of physically old and coming across

...