GOP debate: Your money or your vote
by Tom Sullivan
You knew right away America was in trouble when the branding for CNBC’s GOP debate coverage last night read “YOUR MONEY * YOUR VOTE” — echoes of Jack Benny’s tightwad character getting mugged:
Thug: Don’t make a move. This is a stickup! Now come on. Your money or your life.
[long pause]
Thug: [repeating] Look, bud, I said ‘Your money or your life.’
Jack Benny: I’m thinking it over!
The rest of the night, too, was one, long punchline. The full transcript is here. Sean Illing has a candidate-by-candidate summary at Salon. But the moderators were “mostly awful” and it was “two and a half hours of political gas.”
CNBC’s moderators were so awful they might have asked candidates what costumes they were wearing for Halloween. (Maybe they just didn’t get around to it.) But it meant candidates garnered easy applause in attacking the “liberal” media whenever asked a question they didn’t like, or just to fill time. Think Progress observed that the network that launched the T-party was “too liberal to host the Republican debate on Wednesday.”
In case you got too hammered playing the debate drinking game: Jeb Bush is a goner. John Kasich did a weak imitation of Howard Beal. Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee might as well not have been there. Donald Trump kept quiet, mostly. Even Chris Christy had a decent line or two. Carly Fiorina was a great Hewlett Packard CEO in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Ben Carson did not have economic relations with that nutritional supplements company.
Carson: I did not have sexual relations with that company.
https://t.co/bftIguaM4T— botnet caucus member (@emptywheel) October 29, 2015
The audience was clearly on Carson’s side and gave CNBC big boos for pushing Carson on Mannatech:
It is by now an established strategy (if not reflex) for GOP candidates to dodge uncomfortable questions by looking into the camera and suggesting the allegation is false, “total propaganda,” or a DNC talking point. Their base will believe it and moderators are unlikely to push back, even as Twitter explodes with links to videos or articles from such liberal outlets as the Wall Street Journal or National Review (above) contradicting them.
WSJ: Ben Carson has had ties to dietary supplement maker that faced legal challenge
https://t.co/fOFw3c4jxM via @WSJ— Barry Ritholtz (@ritholtz) October 29, 2015
But Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz had the best night.
When Jebya attempted to knock down Marco Rubio over not showing up for work, the junior senator from Florida was prepared. He cut Bush off at the knees. The New Yorker’s John Cassidy:
But Rubio isn’t just a youthful purveyor of upbeat bromides and echoes of Ronald Reagan. If he were, Jeb Bush would have less to worry about, and so would Hillary Clinton. Beneath his bland exterior lurks a shrewd and feline political operator, with an instinctive sense of balance and a set of claws capable of drawing blood.
He did.
Cruz is the slickest, however. Clever. Calculating. He plays to his audience better than the rest, playing to their sense of being beset on all sides by implacable enemies:
“Let me be clear. The men and women on this stage have more ideas, more experience, more common sense, than every participant in the Democratic debate. That debate reflected a debate between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Nobody believes that the moderators have any intention of voting in a Republican primary. The questions being asked shouldn’t be trying to get people to tear into each other, it should be what are your substantive solutions to people –”
Not even the Chinese are communists anymore. Yet red baiting never goes out of style with these would-be leaders for the 21st century.
Donald Trump decried gun-free zones in public places as a “feeding frenzy for sick people.” But he might have been describing the craziness Kasich sees among his own colleagues. One wonders, without talk radio and Fox News as a culture medium, would the infection be this bad?