By
Jeffrey Blehar
Thursday,
September 28, 2023
Remember
back in 2015, after nearly two terms of Obama, when it seemed like everyone and
their half-cousin had decided to seek the Republican nomination for president?
It was a murderers’ row of big-name Republican officeholders and
businesspeople: Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Rick
Perry, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, Carly
Fiorina, Ben Carson, the son of a postman, you name it. I’m pretty sure I was
running for president for a moment there early on; everybody was getting into
the race, including a reality-TV vanity candidate everyone assumed would fade
quickly, so the early debates had to be sorted into two tiers: the “main”
debate (for the top polling candidates) and the infamous so-called undercard
debates, a bizarrely pointless exercise in which six or seven also-rans yelled
at one another while whistling past the graveyard about Donald Trump, who
eventually became not only the nominee but president of the United States.
In 2023,
after all that, the GOP primary debates are now brutally an
undercard all to themselves. Trump considers this race won already and is
acting like it: rhetorically running on a national level against Joe Biden (by
speaking to autoworkers tonight instead of attending the debate). Because that
basic reality looms largest of all, it’s hard to get too excited about
tonight’s scrap amongst the inevitable also-rans. Given Biden’s weaknesses,
they are now running for something more than mere future political prospects.
(As I have said recently, to great popularity, few seem to realize just how
possible a second Trump presidency is and how weird it would be.)
My long account
is probably not worth it — I would criticize the debate moderation, the
cacophony of hearing candidates bark over one another about trivial matters,
Vivek Ramaswamy’s amazing retro ’90s hairstyle, and the general irrelevance of
it all. My summary is this: The story of tonight was Nikki Haley, who came out
confident and swinging, perhaps overaggressively at times. When she laid into
Vivek it was one thing (she devastatingly unmanned him, after his defense of
Chinese business and TikTok, by saying that she’d gotten stupider for listening
to him), but when she savaged Tim Scott for bizarre, South Carolinian
inside-baseball political beefs, she came across like a woman with an
assassin’s task: Remove all competitors. One wonders how it will play: Most of
the time she was on point and confident, but when she overheated and the
argument began to feel personal, she revealed her fatal flaw — a balance
between magnanimity and precision dagger strikes suits her overall approach
better than going all in.
Ramaswamy
sought to be more conciliatory this time, after having presented himself as the
True Conservative Visionary Leader in the last debate and having been pummeled
for it. None of the other candidates were having any of it, even though I think
on a purely presentational level his tone was vastly improved over the last time.
The visceral hatred every other candidate on the stage felt for him was rather
obviously an act of psychological transference: Since Trump wasn’t there to
pummel, everyone decided to pummel Trump’s avatar instead. But because
Ramaswamy’s tone was different this time (and because most viewers are neither
aware of nor particularly interested in his rather sketchy pre-political
history), he often came off the better in these exchanges.
DeSantis
was on his way to having another disastrous non-showing of a debate — it was
almost perverse how, as the non-Trump leader in the polls, he was allowed to
speak last during the horribly managed introduction — but he
rescued his performance with a solid back half, including a stirring defense of
life that directly took on Trump’s squishiness about the issue. But the hour
was late, and the stakes just too low by that point.
The
other candidates should drop out tomorrow. Pence, Christie, Burgum, Scott — I
could offer play-by-play commentary on their performances, but it feels almost
insultingly unnecessary: To give them notice might encourage them to remain in
a race in which they simply do not belong. All four have their merits as
politicians, but if they care about stopping Trump (as opposed to seeking
cabinet positions), they should leave now and winnow the race to the three
remaining non-Trump candidates — Haley, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy — who have
distinguished themselves. But, again: Donald Trump hovers at or above 50
percent nationally in the primary polls. All of this is a sideshow, an
undercard, until something happens to alter the larger Trump vs. Biden rematch
dynamic.
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