biography, kathleen hall jamieson from the university of pennsylvania and james fallow, the national correspondent for the atlantic. jim, let me start with you. you were the chief speechwriter to jimmy carter and you describe that as being like fdr s tap dance instructor. so here we have another, shall we say, a difficult person to coach in donald trump. and i want to start with that because we can go back in history but trump has never been something quite like him. what have you observed, looking at the primary debates, looking at the first debate, what s the big takeaway for you about donald trump? i think the big takeaway is that his natural style, which seems to be the only style we re ever going to get out of him, was a much better match for the primary debates than it has been at least in this first election debate. he tends to play to a crowd and
being fdr s tap dance instructor. he was not a man who enjoyed or took much direction in terms of public speaking. donald trump faces a huge challenge now tonight. and he s not a man who takes much instruction. so watching the debates, and i know you watched them very carefully of the terrific cover story in the atlantic, watching the debates, what are trump s weakness, watching the primary and the first presidential debate? his main weakness is that there is a style he has, which works very well in some circumstances and quite poorly in others. his style is essentially domination, bomb bast and simplicity of message which during the primary worked fine because there are a lot of people on stage and competing for air time and trump could step in whenever he wanted as if it were a reality show and a wrestling match and make fun of the other people, little marco or whatever else. that worked very well in the primary campaign.