Off Message 5 takeaways from the first presidential debate She hits him where it hurts, and his defensiveness makes him seem wimpy. 
 
 There were a couple of not-so-very-subtle signals here inside of Hofstra University that Donald Trump lost Monday night’s highly-anticipated debate against Hillary Clinton, and badly. 
 
 The first was the audible sound of groaning by some of his supporters (picked up by my attentive colleague Steve Shepard) inside the debate hall as Trump meandered self-defensively through a succession of answers against a very focused, very energized and very well-rehearsed Hillary Clinton. 
 
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 Another tell: After the 90-minute sparring match finished, Clinton’s team practically bounded into the spin room – more in glassy-eyed disbelief than visible elation that things had gone so much better than expected. The GOP nominee’s people, by contrast, dribbled into the media pen like surly seventh-graders headed for homeroom the day before summer vacation. “F—k, let’s do this,” a prominent Trump surrogate said before diving into a scrum. 
 
 Trump and his new-ish messaging team have labored mightily to turn the avatar of populist rage into a reasonable facsimile of someone who you could see sitting in the Oval Office. But this best-laid plan unraveled on Monday – amid Clinton’s steely assault and the dignified interrogation of NBC’s Lester Holt, who struck a deft balance between facilitator, BS detector and lion tamer. 
 
 Within minutes of the opening bell, Clinton’s attacks forced domesticated Donald to go feral – he bellowed, interrupted her repeatedly, grunted, and toward the bedraggled end, became muted and pouty. 
 
 “It was bizarre,” said Barack Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe, who, like many Clinton allies, seemed visibly relieved. “He was clearly rattled, and clearly focused on defending himself, which I’m told narcissists are prone to do, and he clearly faded at the end. It’s not like she’s going to jump out to a 10-point lead, but this was good.” 
 
 Whether or not this reverses Trump’s momentum, or reestablishes Clinton's control of the race is an open question. Who won is not. Here are five takeaways. 
 
 Trump was wimpy when defensive. He is supposed to be the big meanie but it was Clinton who hit him where it hurt most. It doesn’t take a Jung (or even Dr. Phil after a couple of Bud Lights) to figure out that the GOP nominee – who boasts like a barfly – just might be over-compensating. Hence, Clinton, who started the debate a little tentatively, quickly launched into a carefully planned program of Freudian mind-games, contrasting her own middle-class businessman dad (who had his own issues) with Trump’s imperious, larger-than-life father Fred who launched his son’s business career but also was said to be extremely tough on him. 
 
 First she started in with a paean to her father’s running a small printing business in Chicago (This might be the first time a candidate has described, in detail, the silk-screen squeegee process on a debate stage) – then she pivoted to mocking supposedly self-made Trump’s start in the real estate business. “You know, Donald was very fortunate in his life and that's all to his benefit. He started his business with $14 million, borrowed from his father,” she said icily. 
 
 “My father gave me a very small loan in 1975 and I built it into a company that's worth many, many billions of dollars,” he responded weakly – and so it went on a range of topics. 
 
 Whether it was because Clinton was so well prepped, and Trump was so breezily unprepared – or had a simple case of opening night jitters – the bully-boy nominee abandoned his most effective mode of debate combat, answering an attack with a harsher one. She went right for Trump’s ego – questioning his questionable $11 billion net worth, his boastful record on job creation and picking apart his tough talk on fighting ISIS. 
 
 View The 10 most memorable moments of the presidential debate Here are the most memorable and important moments of the night from the first presidential debate at Hofstra University on Monday. 
 
 In 2007, preparing for a primary race she’d eventually lose, Clinton told me that the key to presidential political campaigns was understanding that the most effective attacks weren’t about exploiting someone’s weaknesses but challenging an opponent’s perceived strengths. When confronted with that assault, Trump wilted and offered a series of meandering answers that had his Republicans wincing. “It was a draw,” former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown said. “But he was on the defensive far too much. That’s a direct result of his inexperience.” 
 
 What about the Clinton Foundation? The former secretary’s debate team (including longtime aide Phillippe Reines, who snapped a pre-debate photo in a Trump circled-finger pose) expected him to savage her on the various questions raised about her family’s foundation. They were worried about it. While he hammered her ever-so-briefly on emails, he was so engaged in self-justification, he flat-out forgot to pursue an attack that could have made the night a lot less lousy. 
 
 His “30 years” attack worked – and he’ll use it again. Trump may have lost the first debate, but he’s proven to be a fast learner, and is likely to come back stronger in early October for the second debate, a town hall style affair, in St. Louis. And there were a few gold nuggets strewn in the wreckage of Hofstra – the most valuable an assault (demonstrable and fact-checker-friendly) on Clinton’s effectiveness in 25-plus years of public life. 
 
 The been-there-not-done-that argument was particularly useful when coupled with his usual slams on Bill Clinton’s passage of the increasingly unpopular NAFTA agreement from the 1990s and Hillary Clinton’s election-year flip-flop from TPP booster to opponent. 
 
 “When she started talking about this, it was really very recently,” Trump said of her opposition to the trade deal. “She's been doing this for 30 years. And why hasn't she made the agreements better? The NAFTA agreement is defective. Just because of the tax and many other reasons, but just because of the fact.” 
 
 When Clinton claimed that she planned to “really work to get new jobs and to get exports that helped to create more new jobs.” He scoffed, and shot back, “But you haven't done it in 30 years or 26 years.” 
 
 Clinton effectively attacked his business career. Trump’s attempt to head off debate-night questions about his five-year campaign promoting the birther slander against Barack Obama was a humbling face-plant. His attempt to pin the origin of the charge against Clinton associate Sid Blumenthal was semi-effective with the political press, but it withered under the insistent interrogation of an African-American moderator determined to extract an apology or reasonable explanation. Trump offered neither – and suggested Obama should actually be grateful he pursued the canard because it’s now been resoundingly put to rest. 
 
 Politically, his tortured explanation helps energize black voters – who already oppose him in historic numbers. But later in the debate, Clinton plucked the strains of what could be a genuine crossover hit this fall among ever-elusive white working-class voters and independents: Trump’s failure to turn over his tax returns. Clinton went there with a vengeance – engaging in a little Trump-esque fact-free speculation about the motives of the billionaire developer-turned-reality TV star. 
 
 “So you've got to ask yourself, why won't he release his tax returns?” Clinton mused, with relish. “And I think there may be a couple of reasons. First, maybe he's not as rich as he says he is. Second, maybe he's not as charitable as he claims to be. Third, we don't know all of his business dealings... Or maybe he doesn't want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he's paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody's ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn't pay any federal income tax.” 
 
 Trump’s answer did more harm than good: 
 
 “That makes me smart,” he said – referring to his business, not his political, acumen. 
 
 Her most effective attack – and his worst answer. If the GOP nominee needed any more proof that preparation trumps bombast in a general election debate, he got it when Clinton launched a merciless attack on his habit of stiffing contractors who have labored on his construction projects over the years. Again, Clinton brought it back to her father, describing how bad he would have felt if one of his clients had accepted his work without paying his bill. 
 
 "I’ve met dishwashers, painters, architects, marble installers, drapery installers, who you refused to pay when they finished the work you asked them to do,” Clinton said, delivering a carefully scripted attack. “We have an architect in the audience who designed one of your clubhouses at one of your golf courses. It's a beautiful facility. It immediately was put to use. And you wouldn't pay what the man needed to be paid, what he was charging you to do.” 
 
 This is a particular dangerous issue for a candidate whose entire campaign is rooted in fighting for the working class -- and his flippant response, yet again, gave comfort to his enemies. 
 
 “Maybe he didn't do a good job and I was unsatisfied with his work,” Trump quipped. ||||| Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump succeeded in differentiating themselves in the first presidential debate of the 2016 election on Monday, but they also both missed some opportunities. WSJ's Gerald F. Seib explains. Photo: AP 
 
 It took but a few minutes into Monday night’s presidential debate for the two contenders to distill the essence of the case they are making for taking over the White House. And they did so in no uncertain terms. 
 
 Democrat Hillary Clinton portrayed herself as the woman with a plan, who has been around the block in Washington, who is ready to hit the rich and battle “trickle-down economics”—and who, by the way, wasn’t going to be afraid to go after her opponent, who, she said, “has called women pigs, slobs and dogs.” 
 
 ... ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
– The Hillary Clinton-Donald Trump showdown on Monday night was billed as the most anticipated in many years, and it did not disappoint, according to the Hill, which describes the clash as one between "the more incisive and prepared Clinton and Trump, who leaned heavily on instinct and combativeness." Five other takes on the debate, which many analysts are calling a win for Clinton: Glenn Thrush at Politico calls it a clear loss for Trump, who "became muted and pouty" toward the end. Clinton "went right for Trump's ego," and he "wilted and offered a series of meandering answers" when challenged on things like his wealth and his record of job creation, writes Thrush, who believes Trump "flat-out forgot to pursue" a line of attack on the Clinton Foundation. FiveThirtyEight kept track of the number of interruptions, and Trump comes out way ahead on that score: He had three full-fledged interruptions, where he seized the floor, compared to zero for Clinton, and 24 "fleeting interjections" while his rival kept talking, compared to five for Clinton. The biggest contrast may have been between styles, not policy positions, according to Alexander Burns at the New York Times. "He shouted, interrupted, and sniffed. She kept a level tone and wielded prefab one-liners," writes Burns, who thinks Clinton prevailed on issues of race, gender, and national security, while Trump was strongest when portraying himself as a political outsider. Paul Farhi at the Washington Post takes a look at the moderation and finds that NBC News anchor Lester Holt played a "largely passive role," declining to intervene as "Trump interrupted Clinton and made a series of questionable assertions," though he did seem "to push harder on the Republican businessman" than on Clinton. Farhi notes that Holt's questions didn't cover issues such as "Supreme Court nominations, Social Security, gun control, abortion, student loans, military affairs and health care, especially the Affordable Care Act." It was a debate that highlighted the stark choice voters face, and one where the "two contenders did, in fact, play to their strengths," decides Gerald F. Seib at the Wall Street Journal. "He to his ability to connect with voters on visceral terms, she on her ability to move smoothly from subject to subject with an air of authority." Trump, however, sometimes "seemed a bit too eager to interrupt and play the part of the bully," he writes, while Clinton "occasionally seemed on the verge of appearing smug." (Click for 12 of the debate's standout back-and-forths.)