What Did We Learn from the Debates?

By Jeffrey Blehar

Thursday, December 07, 2023

 

Folks, debate season is over, gone almost as soon as it began, with no further official matchups on the RNC calendar. It looks like it’s time to pack it all in again, strike the set, wipe off the greasepaint, napkin up the blood and entrails, and move on to 2024 and the Iowa caucuses. There can be no doubt that this presidential cycle’s debates were more meaningless than any in recent memory for the simple reason that Donald Trump, who currently holds close to a supermajority nationally among Republican primary voters, was not there. But perhaps we have learned something.

 

Do the winners and losers really matter anymore? It certainly feels like some of the participants on that stage had made their peace with the reality of Trump’s dominance of the field — Christie premised his entire approach on it — which meant that here, at the end of all things, they decided to play for their own stakes. That led to a far more interesting debate in some ways than the last three — especially if you’re the sort of person who enjoys watching politicians feud onstage. The four candidates were each pursuing their own ends, and most of them actually seemed to enjoy themselves while doing it, for once.

 

Ron DeSantis had a genuinely fine debate. It’s a shame that it was on his fourth try out of four, but nevertheless he carried over his sharp performance against Gavin Newsom last week to tonight’s forum, avoided any real mud fights, and delivered one sharp answer after another on issues such as border security, foreign policy, and education. It’s a performance that he desperately needed earlier in the cycle, but it can only help him heading into the Iowa caucuses, on which he has placed all his chips.

 

Nikki Haley’s flower, on the other hand, wilted slightly tonight. Not from attacks against her by Vivek Ramaswamy (about whom see more below), which inevitably elevated her over his bug-eyed rhetorical swings, but rather from her own comportment. When she defended her Democratic big-money donors (a real issue) by bragging that DeSantis envied her support, it was a strikingly ugly look for her, completely divorced from the sentiment of the Republican primary electorate in every way. Haley is aiming for unaffiliated and Democratic voters to cross over in the otherwise sleepy New Hampshire primary and pull a GOP ballot for her (Christie, rather than DeSantis, is the one eating into her numbers with this demographic). She should be far more wary about signaling that so openly, for reasons that ought to be fairly obvious.

 

Chris Christie himself had a good night — finally. With the field reduced to four and him no longer a 30-second afterthought on a seven-man stage, he had space to speak and occasionally dominate the conversation (although when he kept shouting, “Is he fit?” at Ron DeSantis, in reference to Trump’s fitness to serve, I began to feel a little bit like Dustin Hoffman strapped to a chair in The Marathon Man). Christie’s candidacy has been a dead letter since day one, but at least he can say that he got a night to show that he is a spectacularly skilled debater; if posterity is what Christie is aiming for (victory is off the table), then it will record that he finally found his voice tonight. I wish he had remembered where it was in February of 2016.

 

As for Vivek Ramaswamy, what is there left to say about this egregious muppet? The entire Vivek “trip” through these debates has been akin to sitting through a forced rewatch of Sibyl, the Sally Field “multiple-personality disorder” TV movie from the late Seventies. For the first debate, “Bad Vivek” showed up, calling everyone bought-and-paid-for frauds and grandstanding. Then for debate two, “Bad Vivek” was stuffed in a closet and instead we got “Nice Vivek.”

 

Nice Vivek didn’t play so hot either, so Bad Vivek was back with a vengeance tonight, and his performance was easily his most unhinged yet. The absolute confidence and overenunciated conviction he brings to even the most spurious, wildly nutty statements marks him out as either deeply weird or as a man who simply has decided to forfeit his dignity for profit. He called January 6 a conspiracy theory, said the 2020 election was stolen, called Haley corrupt, a fraud, a “puppet for the puppet masters,” said that she would send your children to die in Iran so that she could buy a larger house, and — there was a lot of cross talk — he might also have anathematized her in medieval Latin somewhere in the middle of it all. It was hard to keep up with his serial ridiculousness.

 

So, what have we learned from this mess, after all is said and done? We have learned much about each of these candidates — at least about how they handle themselves on a national stage — but of course none of them will be the GOP presidential or vice-presidential nominee. The most important takeaway is that none of these people will be seriously threatening Trump for the nomination, and it’s easy to understand why given that, over four full debates, none of them really bothered to attack him until this last one. After three scrums spent studiously avoiding Trump’s name like a religious taboo, the former president was finally brought up for real criticism by the other candidates during this debate. Haley attacked him on China, DeSantis on his failure to build the wall, Christie on his fundamental incompetence, untrustworthiness, and venal self-interest. And yet, those attacks felt like small-caliber bullets bouncing uselessly off armor plating, because Trump’s absence meant that there was no response in defense, no argument to be had.