Hillary Clinton draws out insult-spewing reality-TV star Donald Trump

Hillary Clinton will have left Hofstra University in New York, the setting for her first presidential debate with Donald Trump, the happier of the candidates.

The Democratic nominee managed not so much to pass the test of the televised debate - to prove to a watching public that you are prepared and have the right temperament to be the next president - but to force a poor first-debate score from her Republican opponent.

Clinton brought out the worst excesses of Trump, forcing the billionaire New York businessman to slip up in his attempt to show a more reserved statesmanlike and presidential side.

He instead at times reverted to the insult-spewing, finger-pointing, pantomime candidate that dominated the Republican primary debates.

This fits successfully with the Clinton strategy of making this election a referendum about Trump again, as it had been during the summer months.

Trump was certainly Trump last night. He demonstrated how, as had been signalled in the pre-debate commentary, he had not prepared in advance, even on the most-anticipated topics up for discussion.

He has grown a reputation as a free-swinging counter-puncher in debates but in his contest, he landed few of those punches and grew flustered and erratic as the debate wore on.

With just 43 days until the presidential election, polls evenly matched and as many as a fifth of Americans still undecided, Trump - the brash outsider challenging a studious, seasoned political insider - needed to show a more developed, detailed side to broaden his support base.

As the 90 minutes progressed he became more combative, lost discipline and turned deeply personal.

His most effective contributions came early in the debate, before he slipped his leash, when he represented himself as an agent of change and his Democratic opponent as a leader of the past.

"You go to New England, you go to Ohio, Pennsylvania, you go anywhere you want, secretary Clinton, and you will see devastation where manufacturing is down 30, 40, sometimes 50 per cent," he said, hitting her on failed economic policies that have hurt blue-collar communities where he enjoys his strongest support.

Another Trump retort to a wonkish Clinton policy proposal - “typical politician; all talk-no action; sounds good, doesn’t work; never going to happen” - will appeal to the angry, anti-establishment masses that Trump has awoken in middle America.

These moments were few and far between. For the most part, Clinton managed to wind him up and knock him off whatever strategy he had planned to follow (if he had one). He offered little by way of policy depth to bring over to new voters unhappy with the Democrat.

Trump interrupted her and the moderator throughout, hectoring and badgering both. He grimaced and pouted in the split screen, and sniffled between his remarks and snapped at hers. For one of the country’s best-known television celebrities, this was not television gold. It was a hard lesson in political theatre against one of the veterans of this stage. She was unflappable.

The Democrat chose not to rubbish many of the false claims that Trump continued to make. Instead she simply called on the fact-checkers to be ready to dissect his remarks. He appeared weakest trying to defend or deny his most controversial statements, drifting from his message.

Trump’s first-debate performance will likely be judged by the fact that the Clinton camp has more material they can drawn upon to use against the Republican for the rest of the campaign.

Clips of Trump smirking at Clinton’s suggestion that he did not pay any taxes to the federal taxes and responding: “That makes me smart” - or explaining that he called women “pigs, slobs and dogs” because one woman deserved it - will likely feature in new Clinton TV attack ads.

Towards the end of the debate, there was laughter from a disbelieving audience when the billionaire reality TV star declared: “I have much better judgment that she does. I also have a much better temperament than she has.”

Last night’s attacks on Trump will stick.

The idea that a candidate could accuse a rival of having "a long record of engaging in racist behaviour" - as Clinton claimed in relation to the Republican's conspiracy theory about Barack Obama being foreign-born - would have been considered unthinkable in past debates.

It was deeply damaging for the Republican nominee.

Most political pundits declared Clinton the victor with 62 per cent of debate watchers in a CNN/ORC poll handing a win to the Democratic, while online polls by Time magazine and the business channel CNBC showed a majority believed that Trump emerged victorious.

There was certainly enough in the debate to keep his supporters pleased and the Republican nominee scored a sufficient number of points to fight on in two more debates. Clinton, despite some clippable zingers and effective putdowns, came across flat and uninspiring at times, while Trump did little to highlight the high level of distrust that voters have in her.

On temperament and substance - two important presidential traits to be vetted in these televised auditions - Trump has to start improving his performance if he is to win more voters.