Page 42 of 107 Days

Was I the only one seeing the fly?

Should I motion to him to brush it away?

If I did, he—or the audience—might misinterpret the gesture. I thought about saying something, but I didn’t want to embarrass him, or throw him off, or seem to be trivializing the debate.

All these thoughts, when I needed to be focusing on what he was saying.

You can prepare forever, but you can’t know what will happen in a debate, live, in front of tens of millions of people.

In the late afternoon, we decamped from Pittsburgh and headed for Philly.