My patience for political debates gave out long ago. I think the clincher was a 1984 encounter which somehow favored Ronald Reagan despite the clear fact that Walter Mondale out-hustled him on every single question. (I was rather annoyed with Mondale because so many of those tussles revealed him to be the more aggressive and tenacious cold warrior.) It was almost a replay of my first debate experience, Kennedy-Nixon, except where Kennedy appealed to a hopeful future, that future had passed by 1984 and America was ready to be led into senility -- at least they sure picked the guy to do it.
However, some bloggers I follow still take these things seriously, so I figured I'd cite a few of their comments. After all, watching ten right-wing jerks fumble their way through a set of questions and spinning them into their fantasies does offer some opportunity to examine the psychosis that afflicts so-called conservatives today. Whereas Reagan had a knack for amalgamating an imagined past with a fantasy future, at least he was pretty sure it would be a positive future. But today's Republican standard-bearers are united in their conviction that the nation stands on the brink of a catastrophe that only their kind of determined leadership can stave off, even though the scenarios most likely to push the country off the deep end are the very ones that adopt their policy proposals.
Some links:
Gail Collins: Oh, Those Debating Republicans:
But about Wednesday night's debate -- the topic was economics, and the big takeaway was probably that when there are 10 people onstage, nobody is going to have to explain how that flat tax plan adds up. When in doubt, complain about government regulations.
Carson appears to have a particular genius on this front. Asked what to do about the pharmaceutical industry's outrageous pricing policies, he mildly said: "No question that some people go overboard when it comes to trying to make profits," and then he careened off to the cost of government rules on "the average small manufacturer."
Every seasoned politician is good at answering a difficult question with the answer to something entirely different. But Carson -- who isn't supposed to be a politician at all -- was possibly the champ. Where do you think he picked that up? It's a little unnerving to think this kind of talent is useful in the operating room.
Because Carson's voice always sounds so moderate, responses that make no sense whatsoever can sound sort of thoughtful until you replay them in your head. Asked why, as an opponent of gay marriage, he serves on the board of a company that offers domestic partner benefits, Carson said that he believed "marriage is between one man and one woman and there is no reason that you can't be perfectly fair to the gay community." He then proposed, in his measured tones, that "the P.C. culture . . . it's destroying this nation."
Ezra Klein: Ted Cruz's best moment of the Republican debate was also completely wrong:
"The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don't trust the media," Ted Cruz said with considerable disgust. "This is not a cage match."
Cruz ticked off the insults the CNBC moderators had lobbed Wednesday night at the assembled Republicans. "Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, will you insult two people over here? Marco Rubio, why don't you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen? How about talking about the substantive issues?"
The crowd roared. Republican pollster Frank Luntz reported with some awe that his focus group gave Cruz's riff a 98. "That's the highest score we've ever measured," Luntz tweeted. "EVER."
Cruz's attack on the moderators was smart politics -- but it was almost precisely backwards. The questions in the CNBC debate, though relentlessly tough, were easily the most substantive of the debates so far. And the problem for Republicans is that substantive questions about their policy proposals end up sounding like hostile attacks -- but that's because the policy proposals are ridiculous, not because the questions are actually unfair.
Klein goes on to quote some of the questions that Cruz caricatured:
Moderator John Harwood asked, "Mr. Trump, you have done very well in this campaign so far by promising to build another wall and make another country pay for it. Send 11 million people out of the country. Cut taxes $10 trillion without increasing the deficit." [ . . . ]
Similarly, Ben Carson wasn't asked whether he could do math. He was asked whether his tax plan's math added up.
"You have a flat tax plan of 10 percent flat taxes," said moderator Becky Quick. "This is something that is very appealing to a lot of voters, but I've had a really tough time trying to make the math work on this. If you were to take a 10 percent tax, with the numbers right now in total personal income, you're gonna bring in $1.5 trillion. That is less than half of what we bring in right now. And by the way, it's gonna leave us in a $2 trillion hole. So what analysis got you to the point where you think this will work?" [ . . . ]
Meanwhile, Cruz himself was also asked a substantive question. The moderators asked why he was opposing a bipartisan budget deal that would avert a debt ceiling crisis, a Medicare crisis, and a Social Security Disability Insurance crisis. Rather than answer that question, he attacked the moderators for refusing to ask substantive questions, during which he pretended a slew of unusually substantive questions were trivial political attacks.
Cruz's whine was so popular that the RNC decided to act on it and break an agreement they had with NBC to host a debate in February. See: Jack Mirkinson: The GOP's media warfare goes nuclear: How the RNC is trying to hold journalism hostage. One more example how firmly GOP leadership can act to get things done (or, actually, undone).
Although Klein has some piece of a point -- the candidates certainly did manage to avoid answering anything substantial in the questions, more than a few came off as snarky and their opening shot, as Stephen Colbert justly complains, was the worst question ever.
Rick Perlstein: Sociopaths on a Merry-Go-Round:
I sure hope you didn't bother to watch the absurd Republican debate on CNBC Wednesday night. That's what you have me for. Here are two takeaways: Ben Carson said "crap." (Specifically, that "the government picking winners and losers" is "a bunch of crap.") And, remember that time a few years ago when I wrote that getting anointed a star among the Republican elite "is mainly a question of riding out the lie: showing that you have the skill and the stones to brazen it out, and the savvy to ratchet up the stakes higher and higher"? I worry I understated the case. [ . . . ]
Something you will not learn consuming accounts of the debate from all those talking heads, the poor saps, forced by the professional canons of "objectivity" to grit their teeth and pretend what went on on that stage in Boulder was legitimate political discussion. No. This was two straight hours of sociopathy.
Perlstein details examples from Carson, Fiorina, and Rubio, but he could go on and on.
Heather Digby Parton: The medical miracles of Mike Huckabee: Inside the absurd, dangerous & contradictory health care plans of the GOP candidates: Parton also looks at Carson, who has a history of promoting a fraudulent supplement as a miracle cure for Alzheimer's and cancer. Huckabee, who's made a career out of opposing medical research based on fetal tissue, has suddenly found the solution to America's health care woes: "let's cure the four big cost-driving diseases . . . diabetes, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's." Not clear how he'll do all that -- maybe he's bought into Carson's snake oil? More likely it's just that old standby of the religious right: miracles. Huckabee's a big "flat tax" promoter too, if you want another example of magical thinking. Parton concludes:
So here we have two Republican candidates for president. One has offered an incomprehensible health care plan that he cannot explain to the public. The other proposes that the correct approach is to "pass real reform that will actually lower costs, while focusing on cures and prevention rather than intervention.") Both of them oppose fetal tissue research that promise advances in actually curing diseases while endorsing ludicrous scams that don't work.
Every Republican promises to vote to repeal Obamacare. It's a litmus test right up there with tax cuts and abortion. Carson says it's the worst thing since slavery, Huckabee calls it a "nightmare." It looks like magical snake oil cures are now what passes for serious health care policy to replace it.
Parton also unloaded on Jeb Bush's performance: Jeb Bush's stunning, televised implosion: How the former GOP frontrunner became a sad, pathetic joke.
But of course the complaints about the media aren't really about getting easier questions at debates; they're much more pernicious than that.
Republicans are working the refs. They don't care what questions they're asked; what they care about is destroying the credibility of anyone who might criticize their policies or their rhetoric. When Quick asked Carson about the $1.1 trillion in new deficits his tax plan would create, Carson simply replied "That's not true" -- an assertion he could make confidently because he knows Republican primary audiences are much more likely to trust Ben Carson than a member of the media.
Of course his tax plan would be a disaster -- it would involve huge cuts for the richest Americans and drain the treasury, pushing America even deeper into debt. But facts, even obvious facts, don't matter if you can convince people the arbiters of those facts are liars.
Ed Kilgore: Stand With Rand . . . for Nineteen Minutes!: Rand Paul's big moment in the debate was his announcement that he would fillibuster the much-hated Bipartisan Budget Deal (at least much-hated by the faction who'd seize any excuse to shut down the government). Turns out that when he did take the Senate floor to oppose the bill, he spoke against it all of 19 minutes. Ted Cruz can't even read Green Eggs & Ham that fast.
Charles Pierce: I Have Come to the Conclusion That It's Very Easy to Be a Republican Candidate:
Here at the shebeen, we have been talking almost since our grand opening in 2011 about how the institutional Republican party is nothing more than a sham of a mockery of a façade of a shell of its former self. Now, it seems, the candidates may be forming a creepy little cabal aimed at taking even the debate process away from obvious anagram Reince Priebus, the emptiest suit in American politics.
"I think the bigger frustration you saw is that all those candidates onstage had prepared for a substantive debate. Everyone was ready to talk about trade policy and the debt and tax policies," Rubio said on Fox News. "And we're ready for that, everybody was. And then, you got questions that everyone got, which were clearly designed to get us to fight against each other or get us to say something embarrassing about us and then get us to react."
Again, bullshit, all the way down. Rubio was asked a very substantive question about the lunatic tongue-bath to the wealthy that he calls a tax plan. John Harwood cited the conservative Tax Foundation's assessment that his highly redistributive notion of where all the money should end up would balloon the deficit and be an unprecedented windfall for the likes of Norman Braman and (shh!) Sheldon Adelson. If Rubio was "embarrassed" by that question, he should have been.
But nobody is so unencumbered by facts, and nobody is so utterly unburdened by honesty, as the Tailgunner [Ted Cruz], who has proposed a debate moderated by the superstars of conservative talk-radio.
"How about a debate moderated by Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Rush Limbaugh? Now that would be a debate." Hannity replied with enthusiasm: "I'm in!"
By all means, senator. Let's do that.
I'm not sold on Limbaugh, who has a history of massive flop-sweat attacks whenever he appears on television, or anywhere else outside the cocoon of his studio. And Hannity, I think, still wants too much to be a player in mainstream conservative politics to be very entertaining. But Mark Levin? Abso-freaking-lutely. Mark Levin thinks Paul Ryan is a squish. Mark Levin wants the Constitution rewritten to eliminate the popular election of senators and so that states can nullify federal laws. Let Levin moderate a debate and he'll push these clowns so far to the right that they'll end up in Kazakhstan.
Josh Marshall: Some More Thoughts on the Debate: If you dig through the archives you can probably find his "live blogging" -- which I did read but have largely forgotten by now. Here he points out that Carly Fiorina got more time than anyone else (funny no one has tabbed her as winning or even gaining this time, like they did last debate), and Jeb Bush "got the least by a significant margin" (although lots of people have commented on how "sad" or "pathetic" Bush seemed). Plus this:
But as I reflect on the debate a bit more I think a big reason the debate was so weird was that so many of the questions were based on obscurantist and myopic CNBC nonsense -- which is not only far-right and identified with great wealth but specifically owned by the bubble of Wall Street. That led to a lot of odd questions -- like Jim Cramer's saying why aren't GM execs going to jail, Santelli's wild questions or that question about fantasy football. Lots of people are into fantasy football. But whether it's betting and whether it should be regulated, that's a Wall Streeter question -- in the same way huge amounts of the money that gets pushed through political betting sites comes off Wall Street. It's hard for Republicans to say this. But I think this is a significant reason why the debate seemed so odd. And it made it kind of odd to hear anti-liberal bias attacks on the moderators when they were asking questions like shouldn't the Fed be forced to take us back to the gold standard.
I should never miss the opportunity to say that the stupidest thing any political figure can possibly say is that we should go back to the gold standard.
OK, here are the live blog links: #1, #2, #3, #57 (who knows)?, Why is this debate so bad?, Some initial thoughts. For a much longer live blog -- one that will take you longer to read than it would have taken to watch the damn thing -- go to 538. Some side-excursions too. One that I found interesting is that Trump's support is pretty even across the ideological spectrum (23-28%, plus a blip at 30% for Tea Party), where Carson is strictly conservative (with a 27% peak for White Evangelical -- a group that raises Huckabee from 4% to 7% and drops Fiorina from 7% to 2%).
William Greider: Why Today's GOP Crackup Is the Final Unraveling of Nixon's 'Southern Strategy': Not on the debates -- I assume this piece was a response to the House's GOP leadership squabble. The key point is that the pluralism that Ronald Reagan promoted with his "11th commandment" has given way to a hard-core purism that sees every issue as a litmus test and labels any deviant as a RINO.
A Republican lobbyist of my acquaintance whose corporate client has been caught in the middle of the political disturbances shared a provocative insight. "I finally figured it out," he told me. "Obama created the Tea Party." I laughed at first, but he explained what he meant. "We told people that Obama was a dangerous socialist who was going to wreck America and he had to be stopped, when really we knew he was a moderate Democrat, not all that radical," the lobbyist said. "But they believed us."
In other words, the extremist assaults on the black president, combined with the economic failures, were deeply alarming for ordinary people and generated a sense of terminal crisis that was wildly exaggerated. But it generated popular expectations that Republicans must stand up to this threat with strong countermeasures -- to win back political control and save the country.
Greider posits an "odd couple" alliance forged by the Nixon and Reagan "southern strategy" -- a cynical decision by the Republican establishment to broaden their voting base by catering to the racism of southern (and let's not forget many northern) whites. I hardly regard this as so odd: the rich never have the numbers to win in a democracy, so they always have to wrap their naked self interests in a cloak of something that might enjoy broader appeal. Since WWII that was mainly cold war propaganda, with its adulation of capitalism, defense of religion (against "godless communism"), and the growth of a military caste with all the patriotic trappings, including a lot of jingo about "freedom." Admittedly it took a while for Republicans to appropriate those myths as wholly their own, but Barry Goldwater had put it together in terms so stark it could be used to tar liberals as traitors, and Nixon and Reagan only made Goldwater's synthesis more palatable. (What made Nixon appear to be more moderate was that he was generally respectful of unions, albeit more due to pragmatism than to ideology, while Goldwater and Reagan seethed contempt.) If adding a bit of "dogwhistle racism" adds to the vote total, how much of an "odd couple" sacrifice is that really to the Republican rich? There are exceptions, for sure, but the elite country clubs have never lacked for prejudice or snobbery -- why else refer to them as "exclusive"?
I don't see Greider's evidence that the contradictions at the root of the "odd couple" strategy are coming apart -- for one thing, the appetite of Americans for hypocrisy has never been greater, but also the rich have gotten so rich they've become oblivious to the damage and decay the rest of the world have to live in -- but Republicans do have problems keeping their shit together. The first big thing is that the Bush administration from 2001-09 was an utter clusterfuck: so much so that nearly every substantive policy that any Republican can think of today has been tried out and proven to be disastrous. Bush ended his term with approval ratings way below the Mendoza Line (and Cheney's was in single digits, about half of Bush's). The initial response of sentient Republicans to that debacle was to crawl into a hole somewhere, but all that did was to let the crazies loose, and when they seemed to be having some success, the rest of the party, lacking any better ideas or principles, lined up behind them. The only reason they've been able to survive by doubling down on disaster has been their ability to get people to blame the adverse effects of their policies on the Democrats. (Obama and the Democrats abetted this not only by continuing many Bush policies, like the wars in the Middle East and the bank bailouts, but by not squarely placing blame where it belonged, and by not pushing reforms that would make a real difference.)
The reason the Tea Party exploded in 2009 was that the Republican propaganda machine, after eight years of lamely recycling pro-Bush talking points, got a chance to go on the offensive, and they did so with a vengeance. They did so by characterizing Obama as a devious monster "out to wreck America," and they clearly equated America not with the majority who had voted for Obama but with the small minority who listened to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck -- a group that flattered themselves as the only true Americans, the vanguard to "take America back." They may even be right that "their America" is slipping away, but they're also letting themselves be used.
I could probably spend several pages just unpacking that last sentence: there are obvious cons like Beck's gold racket, and there are broader problems embedded in dozens of policy proposals, and there are deeper and subtler problems when a society devolves into nothing but rapacious individuals each out for number one. It seems like a premise of the debates is that all Republicans think alike, so the only thing to decide is the character and tone you want in a leader (ranging from a blowhard like Trump to a soft sell like Carson).
For more along these lines, see Jacob Hacker/Paul Person: No Cost for Extremism. Subhed: "Why the GOP hasn't (yet) paid for its march to the right."