Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily Podcast today is Friday.

October 23rd 2020 I am John Puthhorz the editor of Commentary Magazine with me as always executive editor

Abe Greenwald Hyade. Hi John. Senior writer Christine Rosen-Heikristeem. Hi John.

And associate editor Noah Rothman Hymella. Hi John. Please join us at Commentarymagazine.com to

sample the wonders and glories of our 75th anniversary issue. Commentarymagazine.com would give you

free reads we ask you to subscribe there is so much good stuff there and some really good stuff

as we approach the coming of the end of the election season. I have a pretty interesting blog post

put up last night Noah Christine Christine has a fantastic post about this book about in cells.

A lot of good stuff commentarymagazine.com let's get to it debate last night.

Abe I think you were the most startled by the debate. Maybe amongst us I mean I thought simply

Trump was tremendous. I thought he came out strong and stayed strong the whole time. The most

immediate startling aspect of this was that he controlled himself he controlled himself temperamentally.

He did not attack he did not interrupt he didn't insult the moderator but even beyond that and

that was already sort of surreal considering everything we know about him. He was very focused in

terms of his message very sharp. Cutting of Biden but not in a below the beltway I mean

there's the whole issue of the hunter emails and which I think by the way after all this big buildup

constitute the least effective part of his attack on Biden last night but there were none of the

the sort of Trumpian low blows that we've come to expect his message as an outsider who had to run

because he was watching the way politicians were destroying the country. He has never articulated it

I think more effectively than he did last night. He had some facts at hand that he used quite well.

Of course in other places he took some extraordinary leaps as he always does but overall I've never

seen him be as effective as I thought he was last night. So I wrote a column for the New York Post

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