Okay, so getting up at 2am was not effortlessly conducive to paying close attention to three hours of mostly hotly argued political rhetoric. Still, one has to play the cards one is dealt in life sometimes. So, on the morning of 17 September, the writer shook off that stubborn “embrace of Morpheus” and stumbled into the television study of his home. Then, armed with three cups of ridiculously strong coffee – using espresso ground roast made in a French press – he was now fortified almost enough to face the arguments of 10 men and one woman from amongst the nation’s finest political minds. Or something like that. In this particular case they were hopefuls for the Republican nomination to seek the presidency in next year’s election – something that will only take place in November 2016.
Broadcast live on CNN around the globe, with an audience of at least 23-million Americans and many more globally, this event was moderated by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, along with conservative radio talk show host, Hugh Hewitt. Tapper guided the conversation in rapid-fire style, posing questions directly to individual candidates, but generally allowing sufficient flexibility in that format so that candidates had some real latitude to take verbal pot shots at one another and to trade zingers, gotcha barbs, and the occasional thoughtful response, until they were reined back into the fold by Tapper.
This format allowed for some interesting verbal cut-and-thrust, most especially between Carly Fiorina and Donald Trump, Rand Paul and Trump, and Trump and Jeb Bush. (Following the debate, Fiorina moved into second place behind Trump in the opinions of likely Republican primary voters, according to the latest polling.) However, the rapid pace of this debate’s question-and-answer format also largely precluded substantive, in-depth follow-through on any particular candidate’s views, or where or how they had come to hold such opinions – let alone any effort to tease out what the hidden policy or financial implications of their ideas would be, if such things were actually adopted by the nation.
After listening to the miscellaneous pronouncements from these Republican contestants (and, yes, it did begin to sound more and more like a television game show the longer it went on, even though a gong never rang to cut off any speaker’s more sustained diatribes), a particular mental image of the state of America and its place in the world – as seen by the participants – began to swim into view. The combined vision, as largely articulated by all 11 on the stage, was in stark contrast to the kind of viewpoint that used to come from Ronald Reagan’s speeches and remarks, the man whose presidential library was the setting for this debate and the man whom every one of the speakers claimed to hold in the highest esteem and respect.
This crop of candidates were placed in front of the fuselage of Reagan’s Air Force One jet, the plane he had travelled in over so many air miles during his two presidential terms – something that made for an arresting, albeit rather alarming, backdrop. But the difference in the universe as seen by Reagan two generations earlier, and one glimpsed by the current crop of Republicans could not have been more striking – and more astonishing.
From Reagan’s perspective – despite the fact that it was at a time when the circumstances and even the viability of the American project seemed increasingly threatened, buffeted about by a powerful Soviet military, hampered by a weak economy, bedeviled by social and political insurrections against American interests in many quarters of the world – the world still seemed a glorious place with a better future easily at hand. His sunny disposition – translated into politics and policy – seemed to illuminate the future brightly, even if one disagreed strongly with his prescriptions and diagnosis.
Illustrative of this approach, Reagan never tired of telling the story of the small boy who had wished for a pony for Christmas, and so on the morning of that holiday had gone out to the stable to look for his new pony. Seeing a stable filled with manure, he began to shovel it out vigorously and, when asked what he was doing by his parents, Reagan had said the boy told his parents: “With so much of this manure in the stall, my pony must be in there somewhere!”
By contrast, from their every utterance, the 11 candidates in this second debate all seemed to be describing a world in which the American ship-of-state had magically been transformed into a less-than-seaworthy, creaking, old, tramp East India merchantman. Its sails and masts had nearly been torn away by relentless gales; and it was rudderless in those boiling, pitiless seas, even as it was relentlessly pursued by all manner of malevolent sea monsters, swarming around the ship.
Less poetically, as a nation, America was facing implacable enemies both foreign and domestic – and was near the very brink of collapse. The enemies (not simply opponents) included the current president as well as his former secretary of state and likely Democratic nominee next year. But there was also a whole array of evil, dark forces gathering beyond its borders in the Middle East, in Russia, China, on the flank of Europe, in Mexico, and in Cuba – all eager to strike a death blow. If that were not sufficient, there was the imminent collapse of the nation’s economy; the Supreme Court’s turncoat chief justice (appointed by George W Bush, no less); as well as the newest archfiend, the nongovernmental organisation Planned Parenthood; yet other soul-destroying cultural disasters just ahead; and a particularly loathsome and evil thing named Obamacare.
For the Grand Old Party candidates, their map of the world clearly bore the legend on the bottom right that read: “Beyond these seas there be dragons.” But all of this came in lieu of any real discussion of the potential of a nation where accelerating growth is key, and where economic equity is an issue for much of the electorate, even as unemployment continues to shrink and the economy continues to grow, albeit slowly.
Over that three-hour marathon (no, wait, a winning runner in a marathon finishes in far less time than this debate consumed), non-politician-politician Trump, the ultimate, eye rolling, eyebrow arching, smart aleck New Yorker and self-indulgent, public narcissist, tangled with yet another non-politician-politician, Fiorina, over the nature of his insults to her gender, as well as the relative successes or failures of their respective business careers. Writing in The New York Times, columnist Timothy Egan had described Trump, saying:
“You can’t out-crazy Donald Trump. You can’t best him in half-truths that sound plausible just because you say them with forceful bluster. You can’t be scarier to Latinos than the man who threatens to round them up like stray cattle. And you can’t offend half the population more than the puffer-fish-faced plutocrat who dismisses less-attractive females as ‘fat pigs’, while bragging that he used to sleep with ‘the top women in the world’.”
The normal political rules no longer seem to be applying with him as a candidate since none of this, so far, at least, has punctured his balloon.
Or, as Richard Skinner, writing in a post-debate Brookings Institution newsletter, a leading think tank in Washington, had amplified on this judgment:
“Donald Trump’s credentials as a Republican, let alone as a conservative, are very weak. But his credentials as an anti-Democrat – and especially as an anti-Obaman – are much stronger. After all, he began his transformation from apolitical celebrity to right-wing hero, by engaging in the nastiest possible attacks on Obama: that he is a secret Muslim, that he was not actually born in the US (Something he had again failed to disavow in an exchange with a person attending a Trump rally held after the 17 September debate.) To some Republicans, if Donald Trump is saying bad things about That Kenyan in the White House, he can’t be all bad.”
Mexico’s border with the US also provided fertile ground for a kind of “I see your bet and I raise you an even harsher measure” kind of posturing. The candidates, and in particular, Trump and Ben Carson played with how big a fence to build and whether it should be one big wall or two medium-sized ones with a dual lane road in the middle and with a laser cannon to deal with potential illegal immigrants. (Okay, that last proposal wasn’t on the table, but it might just as well emerge in near future, for all the reality testing that was going on.) For Trump at least, the debate should include whether there would be a national roundup of the estimated 11-million undocumented foreigners in the country. There was – amazingly – little discussion over the sheer, impossibility of carrying out such a roundup, either in terms of due process or even administratively, let alone the disruption to the economy.
Meanwhile, along with other pretzel-twisting mis-statements by the various participants over the course of this verbal steeplechase, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, for example, strained to connect with the potent emotions related to 9/11. As a result, he baldly advanced the start date for his time as federal prosecutor by some three months just to link himself directly to that catastrophe – and, by implication, to show he was the only one in the room who personally knew the full horror of the day and what dealing effectively with terrorism would require. And then there was the eye-watering moment where Carson, insisting on a flat tax, added that in his mind, progressive taxation was simply the dreaded disease of socialism. To this, Trump had countered that he wanted to increase taxation on his friends the local hedge fund managers and similar financial “lords of the universe”.
What never got said in all the arm waving and shouting was any sort of cogent statement of policies to be carried out, either foreign or domestic. Save for Ohio governor John Kasich, the various candidates vied for the chance to say how they would tear up the Iran accord the very day they took the oath of office (without saying what would replace it), or that they would vastly build up the military so they could go toe-to-toe with Russian President Vladimir Putin and roll that red carpet back up before Chinese President Xi Jinping could rock up to the White House on his next week's state visit. However, none of them every really got around to saying what they would do to make the world safer, less dangerous or less problematic than the picture they had just painted of a leaderless ship in mortal danger. Viewers eventually heard from Trump that – inevitably – he was the only one who would be able to deal with both Putin and Xi as tough wheeler dealers, but beyond that, there was virtually not a single word spoken over all that time on the airwaves that spelled out what the various candidates would do, once they had unpacked at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
As an exercise in democracy, this CNN debate was a flawed one. Viewers never really got the chance to learn what the various candidates hoped to do to earn the trust of voters – first in the roster of caucuses and primaries coming up, and then in the general election itself. However, the 11 on stage presented an excellent picture of the electoral challenge Republicans have faced in pulling together the rather disparate wings and ideas animating contemporary Republicans.
In fact, there are several very different wings to this party and they don’t fit together very easily or smoothly. First there are the social conservatives, then a libertarian faction, a small government “main street” wing, the neo-conservative internationalists, and finally the old line big business supporters, all jockeying for primacy. Integrating them into a sufficiently homogenous unified group would seem to be a difficult task, made even less easy by the split between the experiences of the veteran politicians and the non-politician politicians like Trump, Carson and Fiorina.
Where senator Paul seemed the lonely voice of contemporary libertarianism in advocating less government regulation, less interest in meddling deeply in the private affairs of citizens, and less engagement with the world; candidates like Kasich, Marco Rubio and Bush seemed to vacillate uneasily between those small government-main street codes and neo-conservative internationalism. And a candidate like Christie seemed to want to trumpet his ability to harness big business together with that old reliable presidential big stick to be used internationally against Islam. Meanwhile, Ted Cruz was ready for a crusade, somewhere, anywhere, just as long as it would be a good fight – presumably just after tackling that 'dreadful Supreme Court' and its rulings on gay rights and the Affordable Care Act. And to keep things moving right along in the Never Never Land department, the candidates sparred over whether an outsider like Fiorina, Trump or Carson would have more success than someone sullied by years of hands-on participation in the rather grubby business of actual governance and politics.
Trying to parse this out after the debate, The Economist’s columnist on America, Lexington, had argued that perhaps: “The problem for pundits is that opinion polls have proved conventional judgments wrong again and again this season, as Republican primary voters flocked to candidates whose merits are hard to identify. For several months, the key to the mystery seemed to lie in anger. Voters are angrier than ever before with Washington and the political class, it could be stated with confidence. According to this theory Republican voters in 2016 are a bit like the Tea Party in 2009 and 2010. They loathe Barack Obama and the Democrats with a passion and despise Republicans in Congress for failing to thwart him, despite controlling both the House of Representatives and the Senate. That rage is joined by seething suspicion of any promises made by politicians.”
Ultimately, however, Lexington concluded: “Republican primary voters are not in a revolutionary mood, then, but a regicidal one. They think their rulers are corrupt, inept and mendacious, if not actually treasonous. But they are at the same time ready to swoon before new rulers promising to fix America in an instant. The key credential required to earn that trust is a lack of experience. Will those outsiders disappoint their followers in their turn, triggering a still deeper loss of public trust? Probably. This is going to be a bumpy year.”
In the end, this debate settled nothing about anyone other than to shake up the polling a bit, moving Fiorina up to second, coming off her strong debate presence, and Carson and Trump down a peg among likely Republican voters. Rubio went up a couple of notches, Bush threads water and Walker is nowhere to be seen, down to an asterisk.
Still, Bush managed to demonstrate his less than formidable command of such encounters; Cruz proved he is seriously challenged in the likeability stakes; Christie showed he hasn’t been fatally destroyed by his various local New Jersey scandals; Rubio proved he can be a rather effective Latin-flavoured imitator of the Kennedy sheen and energy; while Kasich demonstrated his ability to model himself as the only adult in the room. And perhaps most tellingly, Fiorina proved she could go toe-to-toe with all the others. She could rattle off statistics with the best of them, and look straight into the camera and shoot out laser-guided beams that seemed to say, “Trust me, I know what I am saying. I know what I am doing”. As for the others, Mike Huckabee, Paul and Walker left virtually no fingerprints by the end of it all. If one asked what policies had actually been advanced, one would be left with a pledge or two to rip up the Iran accord, go eyeball-to-eyeball with Putin and Xi, build some walls, and add some ships to the navy. Oh, and strangle Planned Parenthood in its crib.
But there was nothing in those debate comments about how to build a nation to prepare it to be ready to confront the technological, economic, social, demographic and political challenges of the real world – the one without those mythical giant squid or mysterious kraken, poised to swallow the ship. And that was a shame and a missed opportunity. DM
Photo: Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump (L) and Jeb Bush (R) participate in the second US GOP Presidential candidates debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, USA, 16 September 2015. EPA/MAX WHITTAKER
For more, read:
- Poll: Fiorina rockets to No. 2 behind Trump in GOP field at the CNN website at CNN
- Do hate and racism drive support for Donald Trump? At the Brookings Institution website
- Fiorina promises a fight for Republican nomination at AP
- The GOP plays loser’s poker, a column by Timothy Egan in the New York Times
- Evangelicals and the Carson Illusion, a column by Ross Douthat in the New York Times
- Regicidal Republicans, the Lexington Column in The Economist