By Ben Domenech
Friday, August 07, 2015
The only problem with writing about last night’s GOP
debates, as one reader acknowledged, is that there is enough content contained
within to fill seven Transoms. So I will try to cover everything while keeping
comments brief, when I could spend an entire edition merely teasing out the
most awkward banter session I have ever seen on live television conducted by
serious professionals. It was like hour eight of a Thanksgiving Day parade in
which the floats had hit a roadblock further up the road. But once things got
rolling, oh, how they rolled. For now, let’s try to get our arms around what is
probably the best and most interesting debate we’ve seen in Republican
presidential contests in two decades, and run through the potential outcomes for
each candidate. The debate transcript is here. The topline takeaway for me from
the evening: there were a lot of winners and very few losers, and some
performances were unexpected.
I concur with Matt Continetti: Marco Rubio had, hands
down, the best performance. Rubio has been slipping in the polls significantly
of late, fading as others rose and the field became crowded. His command of the
issues and ability to inject inspiration into relatively brief snippets of
dialogue was impressive. Rubio’s debate performance was particularly impressive
in that he didn’t spend a lot of time on foreign policy – he handled a tough
question from Megyn Kelly on abortion very capably, spoke to economic concerns
intelligently, defended himself on immigration, and made a clear case for
forward-looking optimism that really should charm most mainstream
conservatives. His only defect is that, man, did he need some chapstick near
the end.
If Rubio can’t get a bounce from lighting up the HDTV
with a performance like that, it will say something about how much his bad
blood over immigration has hampered his ability to gain momentum. Most
importantly, he did not seem at all like a kid.
Donald Trump will get a lot of headlines for his scrap
with Kelly over his misogynist tendencies. But I actually think he won, too, in
his own way. You can parse his responses as being incoherent or inconsistent,
but Trump understands that the worst thing you can do in a key moment is depart
from your brand. If he had responded to that first hand-raising question with
anything other than his normal approach of screw-you flippancy, it would have
been the sort of Beta male approach that could have defined his debate
performance.
Remember: Trump does not actually poll well among Tea
Partiers or conservatives. His base is made up more of those stubborn Independents. Trump is right where his backers are at this point – many of them
so fed up with both parties that they too would refuse to support the eventual
nominee, nor are they offended at all by their candidate’s political
incorrectness. Contra my colleague Mollie Hemingway, who runs through his ten
worst moments here, there was nothing in Trump’s performance that I found to be
disqualifying among the set that loves him so.
What hurt Trump more during the course of the evening
than his prior stances or his vague belligerence was the performances of those
who could steal some of his populist thunder and take away some of his backers.
On this count, Frank Luntz’s focus group found that Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz
had the best luck, moving Trump voters away to others who seemed more
presidential. Huckabee in particular had a very good night for someone long
removed from the debate stage. Cruz, on the other hand, seemed so unlike
himself – very quiet, asking permission to interrupt, passing on an opportunity
to pick direct fights, and with very little of the grandstanding hostility some
might expect.
Cruz and Ben Carson were both smack dab in the middle of
speaking time, but there’s little question that they didn’t make any of the
headline remarks today. Not unexpectedly, Carson seemed very out of his
element. He sounded the same notes he does in his well-attended speeches, and
you can see his appeal in that sense. But of all the candidates who ought to be
concerned about making it to the next top-ten debate stage – and someone has to
be prepared to leave given Carly Fiorina’s performance – Carson might be the
candidate likeliest to see a drop, not due to any real stumble but simply
because he had the lowest energy of anyone on the main stage.
Low energy was not a problem for Chris Christie or Rand
Paul. Paul spoke the least of any of the candidates on stage, but was the most
eager to be aggressive and start fights with the others. While he closed with a
bit of sunny uplift and expansionism, where Cruz stood back from the fray, Paul
has decided his path back to relevance involves getting aggressive, and he’s
probably right. There’s nothing more to be gained from the nice-guy fusionist
path that has gotten him to 4.5 percent in the polls. The Christie-Paul
mini-debate on security policy was the best moment of the evening for both
candidates: for Christie’s backers, it showed him as a confrontational security
hawk; for Paul’s, a Bill of Rights zealot unwilling to be cowed by a statist
bully. Both candidates need more interactions like that in order to rise.
Scott Walker was Scott Walker: Decent Midwestern
Republican, no flash but nothing too problematic. I was surprised at the nature
of the question to him on abortion, given that it is so divorced from the
national policy debate. Is Fox News under the impression we are on the cusp of
a constitutional abortion ban? Why, on a day when Mitch McConnell said
definitively he will not force the president to shut down the government to
defend Planned Parenthood, would you not ask about that? Walker will have to
defend himself a bit on these social issues going forward, but he otherwise
performed fine and shouldn’t lose any support.
Jeb Bush had a decent if uneven evening, but seemed more
rusty at debating than he might have hoped. More than once, he nailed most of
an answer but struggled to close it off. But he defended himself capably on
Common Core and the dynastic question, and it’s possible he will get better at
this going forward. The largest unasked question for him should have been about
his brother’s actions and the bailouts during the financial crisis, which ought
to have been put to every candidate and will eventually challenge them all.
As for John Kasich: I remain surprised that no one chose
to attack him outright, and that the toughest question he received was from
Megyn Kelly. It’s possible that given his advantage in the crowd – full of
members of the Ohio Republican Party – candidates chose to wait to get into it
with his answer to Kelly’s question (which was, basically, yeah, I’ll totally
expand other government entitlement programs if I think it’s right). His
handling of the gay child question (which was oddly phrased) was solid. The
commentariat believes Kasich is hurting Jeb’s ability to rise. In New Hampshire,
that may very well be true.
For the undercard: whoever has schooled Carly Fiorina in
the interim between this and her embarrassing performance in California’s
Senate race ought to be making a bucket of cash at the end of this cycle. It
really is night and day for her. Fiorina followed a solid performance with a
more impressive interview with Chris Matthews, which you should watch here.
It’s still mostly anti-Hillary rhetoric that is elevating her, so there’s a
question of how sustainable this is, but she is really very good at this now in
a way she wasn’t before.
Bobby Jindal had a decently strong performance in the
early debate, with a combination of his typical populist zingers and a command
of policy that showed. Interestingly enough, it was his line about assimilation
and immigration near the end of the debate that trolled the Left the most. Noah
Rothman responds here. The more Jindal has opportunities to speak to policy,
the more his seriousness shines in comparison to candidates who just recite
their resumes.
Jindal came in second and Rick Perry came in third in the
Fox polling on performance in that debate (which Fiorina crushed). It seemed to
me to be hampered more than any other candidate by the lack of a crowd. His
performance has improved since 2012, but he also had more than one applause
line or joke that might’ve gone over well with someone to react. There was an
unsteadiness about the whole early debate because of this, and it wasn’t helped
by moderators who asked stilted, odd, and questions that were aggressive
without being intelligent. The first round of questions was: “Why do you suck?”
The second was: “Donald Trump, amiright?” This didn’t help matters at all.
As for the rest of the undercard: Rick Santorum had a few
okay moments but seems to be fading as his backers move on to other less
divisive candidates; I didn’t think George Pataki handled the Planned
Parenthood question all that poorly, but he lied about expanding Medicaid; Jim
Gilmore, why are you here?; and Lindsey Graham needs some kind of intervention
– he seemed clinically depressed. I’m no Graham fan, but someone buy the man a
soft-serve or something.
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