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Quick Take on the GOP Debate
I’ve just watched a 90-minute undercard debate followed by a three-hour mainstage debate. I never want to hear the terms “birthright citizenship,” “shining city on a hill,” or “yuge” ever again. However, as your faithful servant, I will offer my quick takes on the winners and losers of tonight’s debate.
Winners
3. Gov. Chris Christie
The normally brash New Jersey governor was thoughtful, self-deprecating, thorough, and seized his moments with aplomb. He ranks in third place for my winner’s list.
2. Sen. Marco Rubio
Wow, does he shine at these things. Utterly unflappable, polished without looking plastic, and connects with the audience on a heart level. A second solid performance.
1. Carly Fiorina
“Lady Liberty” wins the night in a walk. Coming into the primaries I wondered why she was even running. But Carly exudes gravitas. She’s compelling. Even when I don’t agree with her, I want to hear her out. That’s political star power.
Losers
3. Gov. Scott Walker
Walker didn’t do anything wrong, but he didn’t distinguish himself either. With his numbers plummeting in Iowa and his money-men getting nervous, he really needs to step up and soon. (I almost chose the somnambulent Ben Carson for the three-spot, but his fans seem to like his low-key style.)
2. Gov. John Kasich
In the first debate, Kasich seemed to be seizing the squishy moderate crown of Nerf from Jeb. But the Ohio governor spent most of the second debate defending Democrats’ programs and failures. Out-of-step with the national mood, not to mention the GOP.
1. Donald Trump
Wishful thinking on my part? Perhaps. But the frontrunner always enters a debate with the most to lose. Standing amid the accomplished GOP field with Reagan’s jet as a backdrop, The Donald looked petty, small and out of his element. He improved as the night wore on, but I’m wondering who sat through until the end.
Beyond the candidates, the biggest loser of the night was CNN. What a shameful, disorganized, and unserious presentation. The majority of questions were directed to Trump. Those that weren’t, were questions about Trump. And often when another candidate responded, even on a non-Trump topic, CNN had a split-screen showing Trump’s dramatic reactions to their answers.
CNN’s intention was not to inform voters or discuss ideas, but to toss scorpions in a bottle and watch them fight over side issues. I’m quite shocked that the normally excellent Jake Tapper and Hugh Hewitt agreed to this silly format.
UPDATE: Interesting Twitter stats…
Published in GeneralTwitter’s debate data pic.twitter.com/JkVwk9y6Mo
— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) September 17, 2015
The line is a double winner. But once everyone has heard it, word-for-word, several times, it can sound canned. Although far more important, it could take on a “Did you know my father was a mailman” quality.
I think her support for Israel and stand against Iran are two of her strongest positions. It is tough to get strong views into short statements. But a little variation in construction can be helpful. But she’s certainly smarter than I on what will work for her.
Agreed. As I said to my wife, “Trump is like someone who has never skated before showing up at the Olympic figure skating finals, somehow getting on the ice, stumbling around like a buffoon (becoming alarmingly red-faced in the process), and receiving 10’s from the judges.”
I just don’t get it. He says nothing any more substantial than one would expect of a Cliff Clavin-type sitting at a bar and spouting off.
Trump: “Just the other day, two years old, two and a half years old, a child, a beautiful child went to have the vaccine, and came back, and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.”
Oh, for Pete’s sake – put a cork in it, Cliff.
Of note for drinking-game enthusiasts: Trump used the adjective “tremendous” only seven times.
So wait, there are 12 Republican debates and only 6 Democratic ones? Is this correct? And at the Democratic debates, will the moderator start the debate by prodding the candidates to attack one another, as Jake Tapper did?
Another possible loser: Hugh Hewitt. Why did he back down to Trump so much? Trump called him a third-rate radio announcer after the interview didn’t go his way. C’mon Hugh, don’t put up with that! Then he kissed up and said Trump was the best interview ever.
I was very happy with Rubio’s and Fiorina’s performances. Chris Christie was surprisingly good at making the most of his time and getting straight to his point.
The moderators made the debate about Trump, though, to the extent of coddling him. He got the most airtime of all of them, which is a shame, since he had nothing of value to say.
I love Carly’s “two phone calls” line, but I think there are a lot of voters who haven’t heard it before, and that is precisely why I think she should keep it. No need to preach to the choir. And I don’t care if she smiles or not. I actually like her composed seriousness.
My wife quit into the first hour after it was nonstop Trump. I made it a bit longer… seems the only thing I missed was the Ten Dollar bill discussion, which I caught on youtube later.
Give me a break! She was trying to appeal to women voters to get them to vote for McCain. Of course she’s going to go after women who were disappointed that Hillary didn’t get the nomination.
It’s called politics.
Way too many people at these debates. They need to jettison Kasich, Christie, Paul and Huckabee, who all have zero chance of getting nominated.
Let’s face it, we need to get THIS guy in the next debate.
How is it that with not one but TWO MD’s on the stage no one seized the opportunity to humiliate Mr Trump for his absurd comments on vaccination? It would have been so easy…
Mr Trump, what changes would you make in our current vaccination schedules?
Mr Trump, are you familiar with the data linking vaccinations to autism? Perhaps you know Wakefield’s 1998 paper in the Lancet?
Mr Trump, do you realize that the oft-quoted paper in the Lancet was fraudulent and had to be retracted?
Mr Trump, how many cases of small pox, diptheria or whooping cough have you seen lately? Are you aware that vaccination has made smallpox extinct and the others rare?
Mr Trump, what other opinions are you spouting that have no basis other than your enormous ego?
What a schmuck. Republicans deserve to lose if they don’t have the bells to want to win.
That’s probably true, and I’m sure it makes sense, if you’re Trump. Personally, I think all this split screen stuff is overdone and annoying. And in this sort of event, when one hopes (ever more vainly) for a little gravitas, dignity and decorum, it has the opposite effect, especially if one of the candidates is obviously mugging for the camera.
But I guess Trump is betting on the fact that the majority of his audience will find his reaction shots entertaining, and that they will take the listener’s attention off the other speaker, and refocus it on Trump (see comment #66) and he probably doesn’t care about the (he believes) small segment of people who will see him only as an childish attention pig and who are not charmed by it in the slightest.
Trump said similar things about democrats, back when they could have wrecked his business interests. We’re being told by some folks that everything Trump says now is a conspiracy with Hillary Clinton to elect her president.
I have to wonder just why, exactly, I’m supposed to give Fiorina a complete pass for expressing her admiration for Hillary, but not Trump.
And if this is merely how Fiorina plays politics, then it is a sign that she’ll be no more successful than any other Republican when it comes down to actually fighting the left.
If you’re spending your scarce time praising your opponents- which Fiorina is doing here and too many Republicans do as well- then you’re not making a case for your party or yourself.
You are in fact aiding your opponents and helping them defeat you. People who aren’t inclined to vote for you will be assured that they’re making the right choice when you praise the other party. People who are, will doubt, because if your opponent is so awesome that you feel you must praise them, often at length, then you must not think too poorly of them, or else you’d be more critical.
Saying Barry was a nice guy in over his head did not make Mittens president, for example.
Fiorina is committing the opposite of politics, in my opinion.
So she should’ve appealed to Hillary supporters how? By trashing Hillary? You really should be a campaign advisor.
Xennady, you don’t have to give her a pass, but, as I mentioned in an earlier comment, it is worth considering context. I can’t find an exact date for the video, but it seems clear that it was made after Obama won the nomination, as Fiorina refers to Hillary’s candidacy in the past tense. Fiorina was, at the time, a surrogate for the McCain campaign. Clinton had maintained an edge over Obama with female voters in most states. The McCain campaign, stupid though it was, surely understood that it should make a play for those votes. Hence Carly’s video.
Considering the relentless, miserable failure of the Republican party over my lifetime, yes, maybe I should be a campaign advisor.
And, yes, I think Fiorina or any other Republican should absolutely appeal to the supporters of candidates of the other party by pointing out to those supporters the flaws marring those candidates, the failures of their ideas, and (since we are talking about democrats) their felony offences.
In other words, by trashing them.
Brown-nosing doesn’t seem to be working too well.
Let me break character as a rabid Trump supporter for a moment and say that, yes, I do give her a pass. Fiorina is a bright spot in the GOP, and I hope and expect she’ll do well in the future.
But I don’t think it was smart politics for her to praise Hillary, for reasons I’ve already noted, nor do I think it was the right way for the McCain campaign to attempt to win support from Hillary voters, ditto.
I just find it really grating to watch Donald Trump get bitterly condemned for doing roughly the same thing as other Republicans have done, making the same compromises, and generally acting in his own self interest.
The party should let him fail on his own merits, and not try to push him over.
Xennady, I’m not aware of any other Republican in history ever saying that socialized medicine worked “incredibly well” — on a Republican debate stage. That’s not a minor issue, it’s a defining one that puts this well outside the realm of moderate squish vs. conservative, or real person vs. politician.
That’s not the kind of thing Republican politicians do. It’s not the kind of thing people with even the remotest approach to actual conservatism say.
What has looked like weak political calculation, though, has been the overall unwillingness of the others in general to call him out. Last night, the presidential field as a whole evidently decided it was time to stop playing along and show actual leadership.
Comparing a single video by Fiorina to the vast and well-documented Democrat support by Trump is like comparing a dingy to a mega-yacht.
“Beyond the candidates, the biggest loser of the night was CNN. What a shameful, disorganized, and unserious presentation.”
I saw most of the debate. Didn’t CNN give the candidates much more time to speak to one another than Fox did in the first one, or am I misremembering? That made it more of a debate than Fox’s collective press conference, I thought.
“…more time to speak to one another” is not enough of a criterion to call it a better “debate.” What CNN was trying to create was a knife fight, not a debate. In their questions, they wanted a Roman gladiator fight, not a “debate” on the issues. On a slightly related note, Jake Tapper spent an enormous amount of energy displaying just how much disdain he had for all the candidates in his “Thank you” stylings.
So they decided to attack the frontrunner. What leadership. Yay for them.
About that socialized medicine- well, let’s discuss.
I note that Obamacare is the law of the land. At least, that is, the parts that Barry wants to enforce, on any given day. The GOP response is nowhere to be seen- because it is not yet in sight. Old joke from another context, ha ha.
It seems to me that we already have socialized medicine except for the people most likely to vote for the Republican party.
Middle class voters still get the, uhm, benefit of an increasingly squeezed private system, with costs heavily shifted onto those with insurance- those most likely to vote Republican- while those most likely to vote democrat are lavished with freeeee medical benefits, as much as they’d like. Those with tax money lavished upon them includes illegals aliens, btw.
I’ll spare everyone multiple examples from my experiences, as I expect everyone else has their own.
You want to attack Trump for praising socialized medicine- fine, it’s a valid complaint- but don’t forget the rest of the story, which I note above.
How is that supposed to make me more tolerant of Trump’s praise in contrast to the rest of the field? None of the other candidates, to my knowledge, voted for, praised, or tolerated that bad law — save Kasich’s medicare expansion, which is equally disqualifying. Some have done everything in their power to fight that law, and the presidential run is the next and most serious battle in that fight. We do indeed have at least one serious repeal and replace plan, and should have others.
That said, no, we’re nowhere near the Scottish healthcare system Trump praised. We are talking about numbers of people living and dying — about cancer survival rates, for one thing. There are numbers, not just my impressions. I’ll hunt up the latest I’ve seen if you’re interested.
But we’re going that way under Obamacare; it will spiral into collapse and give us single-payer if we don’t elect a president to handle it otherwise. Which means it is precisely the wrong time to elect Trump.
If Kasich were the front-runner he’d get that rant from me too.
As for attacking the front-runner, it comes after weeks of too much tiptoeing around Trump. I’m not saying it took any kind of bold courage from any particular candidate. But it needed done. I certainly respect it more than Cruz’s method of still playing along in hopes of eventually picking off Trump’s supporters.
@ Xennady – The Republican Party has voted 54 times at the least to either fully repeal, defund, or at least partially stop Obamacare. In terms of political governance (remember that Reid killed all GOP bills from 2010-2014) the Republicans have tried relentlessly.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/03/21/the-house-has-voted-54-times-in-four-years-on-obamacare-heres-the-full-list/
The context is that a conservative Republican does not vote to support or defend state dominating the market ever. Donald Trump has supported a litany of leftist positions (from abortion to gun control) and used his wealth to influence dozens of politicians to give him politically favorable treatment that knocked out competitors and kept them out (not to mention the fact that he inherited his business and wealth from his father who also used regulation to kill competitors), which raised costs for consumers and made him higher profits.
He is literally what the left thinks of business and yet is what all leftist businessmen do. As he said during the first debate he proudly games the system like all “successful Americans” and uses bankruptcy law to screw over investors to his monetary benefit. He is categorically scum.
I hope and pray that those who allege to be conservative and support Trump come to see past his deceptive nativism and protectionism which he sold to you as “Make America Great Again”. He mocks our values and we conservatives are far better individuals than to support him.
I have been a fence sitter on Trump. I could see upside to him winning the nomination. But, his performance last night reminded me just how sleazy he is.
I might have told a poll taker I’d support him if they called at exactly the right time…I might have been in those numbers. So if you take that as anything… I think Trump will lose support. He is sleazy.
Also, my husband who has not really begun to pay attention, saw only a few minutes and Trump’s dissing of GW Bush, made him say, “If Trump ever had a chance at my support that blew it. No way I’d want him now.”
I do think Trump will lose support. He may gain some too, who knows.
But Reagan’s 11th commandment does still mean a little bit as far as dissing GWB.
Many of us watched the left destroy the Iraq war, and their only motivation was Bush v. Gore, not the war.
Trump was part of that back in the day. It was a gamble to go into Iraq. We knew it then. And it turned out ok, until the left started the 2008 campaigning and sucked away public opinion, which tied Bush’s hands.
Then Obama destroyed the Middle East completely.
Trump helped Obama destroy the Middle East by going after GWB.
Yah, Trump did himself harm. I don’t know how much, but immigration isn’t going to save him from himself.
I’ll try.
We know what she did in business and that can demonstrate character and overall judgment. I’ve seen cases made both ways on Fiorina and haven’t formed a firm opinion at this point, so for purposes of discussion I’ll assume that is all positive. But business is not governance. Business leaders don’t necessarily excel, and plenty of effective political leaders have never been businessmen.
Here’s what we can’t know: how does she put her ideas into policies and get them enacted within political and constitutional limits? Can she keep her principles, her judgment, and her sanity in Washington, with its unique levels of adulation, hatred, crushing responsibility, complicated decisions on obscure issues that affect thousands?
The other thing her record can’t prove is her political principles. I’ll grant her much more evidence than Trump — she actually ran a pro-life campaign in California — but for the most part we have simply her word. Impressive as her language is, that’s a thin rope on which to hang the fate of the country. Now at least it’s a rope. If Trump’s the alternative — never mind Clinton — I’d grasp that thin rope with both hands. But I’ll look for a stronger first.
To answer this one specifically — I can’t prove anything against an unknown, and without a record we can’t know. Whereas if they have a record, they’ve committed themselves beyond rhetoric, and we can judge accordingly.
I don’t think we have much substantial evidence that Cruz would be a more effective executive; we do have much more substantial evidence of his approach to politics and of the issues he chooses to promote in office.
Likewise with Rubio, save that his record is longer with more actual governance. He’s made deals (for better or worse) and chosen priorities.
Washington tends to turn people into squishes. So do liberal places elsewhere. Walker managed to govern in Milwaukee County for eight years, step up to Madison, and remain conservative. If you can keep your head in Milwaukee and Madison, that’s decent evidence you won’t fold too easily in Washington. Maybe more evidence than we have for any of them. He’s also shown the ability to push a conservative agenda very effectively on a range of issues — to lead legislators and a broader movement, and to put principles into policy in a way that actually accomplishes the goal.
Now her communication skills matter too. But that’s concrete evidence we don’t have about Fiorina.
Dear Sash: speaking as someone who was on the left at the time my only motivation for opposing the Iraq was definitely not Bush v. Gore.
It was the following:
1.) Saddam was a problem, but he was a problem that could wait
2.) Afghanistan deserved our full attention
3.) If the decision is to fight two wars at the same time, you can’t do it on the cheap. Bad time to cut taxes. Leftists did not destroy the war. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al badly botched it because they were arrogant, impatient and cheap.
4.) and BTW, my son was a Marine at the time which meant all of this seemed just a touch more urgent to this liberal Mom.
also 6.) frankly, if you “gamble” with other people’s lives and money, and the game starts sliding south, you can expect public opinion to go with it. That’s kind of how the cookie crumbles. Really good reason not to a.) start an unnecessary war and b.) tell everyone the war is necessary, but also that it’s going to be virtually painless.
For you, maybe.
But the near instantaneous disappearance of the anti-war movement on January 20, 2009 suggests you may have been in the minority.
Cutting taxes didn’t impede the ability to spend money on the war (or anything else) it just meant more debt. Which might be a bad idea from a fiscal perspective — though given the context of the Dot Com crash plus 9/11 I think some fiscal stimulus to prop up the economy made sense.
Regardless I don’t buy the idea that cutting taxes forced the administration to fight the war “on the cheap.” We had plenty of money to spend on the war, I don’t think a bigger budget would have changed the strategy.