Fox analysts indicate that Republican voters want to hear the GOP’s candidates train their fire on Democrats rather than one another. And it is true that Republicans are discomfited with internecine conflict. But none of the candidates will distinguish themselves with their criticisms of Joe Biden because they’re all quite adept at issuing them, and the president is so vulnerable on so many fronts it doesn’t require all that much cleverness to effectively ding him. The distinctions will be drawn, and the moments people will remember, will come when the candidates train fire on each other.
I’m not sure I’m up for a Republican debate, but I’d love to be at the Reagan Library. It’s a beautiful, inspiring spot. Prayed there for our country around this time last year at the National Review Institute annual gala.
Gavin Newsom insists that tonight’s debate “is a sideshow, by any objective measure” because Donald Trump’s 30-point lead in the polls failed to evaporate in the month that has since elapsed. That’s nonsense. The first debate did matter. It mattered for Nikki Haley, who jumped from sixth to second place in the first primary state in the nation. It mattered for Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, who reported that they experienced a surge in fundraising. Next month’s financial reports will show who “won” and who lost the quarter, which will determine how long they can remain in the race. It’s a marathon, and the game is not yet about engineering election outcomes. It’s about positioning. Expect this debate to have another measurable effect on the trajectory of the race.
Frankly, what this stage needs is an inflatable Donald Trump at the center podium, after the fashion of Otto the Auto-Pilot in Airplane!
Maybe that would be sufficient to remind the candidates on stage that there’s somebody else they need to beat in order to get the nomination.
Traditionally, the candidate’s placement on stage is determined by their numbers in the polls – leading candidates on center stage, candidates who just barely made it on the edge. Tonight, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum will be on the far left side of the stage. On the far right side will be… former Vice President Mike Pence. Less than three years ago, Pence was a heartbeat away from the presidency. Right now, he’s running fourth in the national RealClearPolitics average, about 42 percentage points behind the man he served as vice president.
Jim Geraghty argued in the Corner that the candidates onstage need to bring their passionate A games tonight. I’d add one specific: don’t be Tim Pawlenty. Pawlenty was a fine, tough, as-conservative-as-he-could-get-away-with governor of Minnesota, elected in 2002 and re-elected in the blue wave of 2006. The state has never had another Republican governor, so we should be impressed with that. But he committed a cardinal political error: he went hard after Mitt Romney for his state healthcare plan on the trail, then backed down when he had the chance to do the same thing on the debate stage. It’s the same mistake John McCain made in 2008 when he went hard after Barack Obama’s ties to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at the height of the 2008 credit crisis, then failed to take that shot face to face.
A similar and related issue is missing an obvious dunk. Chris Christie did that in 2016, when he was asked in the first debate about Atlantic City and totally failed to take the opportunity to dress down Donald Trump for abandoning the good working people of that city. Doug Burgum did it in this cycle’s first debate, when Vivek Ramaswamy claimed that all his opponents were bought and paid for by their donors – if anybody can object to that, it’s Burgum, who is so rich he is buying donors rather than the other way around. He just sat there like a potted plant.
Every good courtroom lawyer knows that you need to go in prepared not so you can repeat stock lines but because a prepared lawyer is ready to improvise when things get unpredictable. This field includes two former trial prosecutors (Christie and Ron DeSantis). Both have hit Donald Trump hard in recent days on the stump. Are they ready to avoid the Pawlenty trap, and are they and the others in the field prepared for the unexpected?