Are they t*rying *to get him elected? I would have thought with a candidate like that they would have made every effort to make sure everything was working perfectly. Now he has an excuse. Which I don’t <sarcasm> think he’ll use much</sarcasm>
Excuse for what? It’s not like everybody didn’t plainly hear him go off the rails and into the woods. “Mic problems” don’t turn golden bon mots into incomprehensible word salad. He also had two mics going - one on the lectern and one on his lapel. Is he saying that the lapel mic was up too loud, and it picked up his hanky rustling and it sounded like sniffling? Sorry, Don - you still sounded like an idiot, and you still got your ass kicked.
You do realise that he now has a perfect excuse. He (except for the first 10-20 minutes) was lousy, no doubt but perception that he is trying to create is that the powers that be are against him and this assist in it,=.
Don’t know about you, but I heard every word he said. And this:
(emphasis added)
is somewhat ambiguous. Does it mean that there were problems with the sound level in the debate hall, but not necessarily in the audio feed to cable TV? The hall was filled proportionally, half Republicans, presumably Trump supporters. And nobody said anything?
Boy do I hate defending that man-child but I’ll do it here.
It sounds like there were problems just in the debate hall. Some have suggested that Trump performs better in front of a live, friendly audience. Perhaps if the audience couldn’t hear him well and couldn’t respond to the idiotic things he said, it could have put him off his game – except that the audience wasn’t supposed to respond at all. In theory, the audience not hearing him should have not had the slightest effect on his performance. He should have expected no response to anything he said and acted accordingly.
I don’t know if this same problem would have affected his monitors which might have made it tougher for him to know if Hillary was ignoring his interruptions because she couldn’t hear him or just because ignoring him is generally the best idea.
The real problem is that the format was something new to Trump. Being on a split screen, going one on one with a different type of adversary – he wasn’t prepared. That’s his problems. Some people might buy into a conspiracy theory, I suppose, and unfortunately, as I pointed out a while back, Hillary’s pneumonia already confirmed one conspiracy theory, and before that the DNC leaks seemed to partially confirm another, so people won’t entirely dismiss the possibility of a ‘rigged’ debate. But I think the problem is, people saw what they saw and heard what they heard. There’s no un-seeing it, no un-hearing it.
It would make total sense if he was asked “why did you not do your best in the debate?” and he said “there were problems with the mic and monitor and the sound levels threw me off my game” or something like that. But he started blaming the mic when he was asked about his sniffles.
The mic was both good enough to hear breathing, which made it sound like he had sniffles, but also was very bad. Also of course he hasn’t admitted that he did poorly at the debate, he thinks he did great.
That makes total sense, of course he messed things up since he can’t listen to instructions.
I’d love to see Hillary open the next debate by saying “I’m glad to be here, my mic is working well but even if it wasn’t I’d still mop the floor with Cheetoface over there.”
Plus the Commission’s statement seems to indicate that the audio problem only affected the sound level in the debate hall, whereas the sniffling was heard over the airwaves. I also wonder if the microphone’s calibration referred to in the article was thrown off by changes in tone, volume, etc. when he lost his composure and started ranting.
“My mike seems to be OK, how’s yours, Donald? Want to double check, make sure everything is up to par? If we are pressed for time, you can take some of mine, I’m not going to need it all.”