Hillary Clinton was forced to defend her dubious handling of classified information on her private email server, her ill-fated vote authorizing the war in Iraq and her hawkish instinct to support intervention in Libya.
Donald Trump dodged specifics on how he’d destroy the Islamic State group, delivered conflicting answers on how to improve veterans’ health care and obscured his past support for the deployment of troops abroad.
Each broke a loose rule not to attack one another, though Trump did so more often.
The first joint appearance of the two major-party presidential candidates — who appeared back-to-back on the same Manhattan stage during an hourlong commander-in-chief forum on NBC on Wednesday — exposed their most conspicuous weaknesses.
The former secretary of state came prepared with answers but found herself explaining or apologizing for past mistakes and controversies. The New York City billionaire issued a litany of grandiose pronouncements and blistering critiques without supplementing them with much detail or precision to inspire confidence.
The forum, moderated by “Today” show co-host Matt Lauer just days before the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, opened with an aggressive prosecution of Clinton’s trustworthiness, her most enduring vulnerability.
During a string of probing questions — including one from a naval officer in the audience — on why she treated messages about the U.S. drone program as unclassified material, Clinton claimed she never put national security at risk and stressed that there is no evidence her system was hacked.
“I did exactly what I should have done,” she said, defiantly noting the FBI itself discussed drones in unclassified material.
“You know and I know classified material is designated, it is marked. There is a header,” she told the officer. “What we have here is the use of an unclassified system by hundreds of people in our government.”
Clinton again admitted her 2002 vote to authorize military action against Iraq was a mistake but quickly pivoted to her broader record on military and veterans’ affairs, including her legislative partnerships with Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona.
She also leveraged it as her first opportunity to swat at Trump.
“Now my opponent was for the war in Iraq,” she said. “He told Howard Stern he supported it.”
Trump continued to claim he was “totally against the war in Iraq,” even though when Stern asked him in September 2002 if he favored an invasion, he replied, “Yeah, I guess so.”
It’s that type of slippery, contradictory rhetoric and positioning that Trump got away with during the Republican primary and continues to coast on to this day.
Trump promised to exponentially slash the time veterans have to wait for a doctor’s visit, but at the same time pledged he would never privatize the VA hospital system.
“We will pay the bill,” he said.
Minutes later, in responding to a question about the alarming national rate of veteran suicides — some 20 a day — he dubbed the the VA “a corrupt enterprise” and suggested he would allow veterans to use private hospitals if the VA didn’t ultimately improve.
It’s that type of stream-of-consciousness response that has Trump outlining head-spinning inconsistencies between just a few breaths.
On the Islamic State group, Clinton attempted to balance her muscular instincts with public opinion that is wary about another U.S. ground war.
“We have to defeat ISIS,” she said, using a nickname for the extremist group. “That is my highest counterterrorism goal.”
But she unequivocally ruled out deploying ground forces to Iraq and Syria, even though the U.S. already has a contingent currently in the region.
“They are not going to get ground troops. We’re not putting ground troops into Iraq ever again,” she said.
Instead she favors airpower and support for Arab and Kurdish allies already conducting the fighting. Where she would deploy ground troops, she indicated, would be on a “case-by-case basis.”
Trump gave few hints on exactly how he’d confront the Islamic State group, arguing that revealing such details to the public was a grave mistake already committed by President Barack Obama. If elected, Trump has tasked military generals with devising a plan to defeat the extremists within 30 days of his administration.
But for now, what he’d actually do is a secret.
“If I win I don’t want to broadcast to the enemy exactly what my plan is,” he said.
Although he claims to have been an opponent of the Iraq war all along, he blames the rise of the Islamic State on Obama’s decision to pull out of the country too soon without leaving reinforcements.
Trump said, the “U.S. shouldn’t be there, but if we’re going to get out, take the oil.”
When asked exactly how he would extract millions of gallons of oil from Iraq’s ground and transport it to the U.S., he simply said he would leave “certain people” behind to accomplish the task.
The decision to support the intervention that toppled Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi has dogged Clinton throughout her campaign. But she again stuck by it Wednesday by saying that allowing an ongoing civil war to metastasize would’ve been just as dangerous as the current strife.
Much like her answer on Iraq, she also pointed a finger at Trump, noting, “There is no difference between my opponent and myself.”
Trump has flip-flopped on how he would’ve dealt with Gadhafi, first saying back in 2011 that the Libyan leader should be taken out “very quickly, very surgically” before professing during this year’s primary that the U.S. would be in a better position with Gadhafi still in power.
At times, it was difficult to measure which candidate was more dovish and which more hawkish.
While they both talked forcefully about the need to eradicate the Islamic State, in general terms they conveyed a view of using force only in the most dire of circumstances.
“I view force as a last resort, not a first choice,” Clinton assured a liberal questioner skeptical of her trigger finger.
“I would be very, very cautious, I’d be a lot slower. She has a happy trigger,” Trump said.
Trump avoided a campaign-altering gaffe that poses a perpetual risk for the novice free-wheeler. He simply steamrolled through his 30-minute segment with generalizations and his trademark peculiar riffs.
He claimed the evidence of the success of his recent trip to Mexico was that officials had been forced out of the government since his arrival.
“That’s how well we did,” he remarked.
He largely stood by his earlier broadside that he knows more about the Islamic State than current military generals, yet still claiming, “I have great faith in the military.”
He again praised Russian President Vladimir Putin by citing his 82 percent approval rating and lauding his chops as a leader, mostly because Putin has praised him.
“If he says great things about me, I’m going to say great things about him,” Trump said.
Trump even continued to evolve on his hard-line immigration plan, by saying he would allow undocumented immigrants who plan to serve in the military to remain in the country.
“The answer is it would be a very special circumstance, yes,” he said.
Thirty minutes isn’t much time to deeply survey anyone’s positions on hotspots around the globe, and a mixture of critics thought the media was again the loser in trying to extract clicky headlines, rather than illuminate complicated issues.
“This forum was an absolute disgrace,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in a statement. “Matt Lauer treated this forum less as a chance to educate voters about the real differences in temperament and policy between the candidates and more as a chance to do clickbait trolling. Instead of asking about big ideas, he asked small-bore questions that voters aren’t asking at their dinner tables.”
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Hillary Clinton Plays Defense, Donald Trump Dodges at Commander-in-Chief Forum originally appeared on usnews.com
