On the menu today: Before we get into the winners and losers from last night’s Republican presidential-primary debate on Fox News, we should observe that the structure of the debate was designed to keep things moving, which left certain candidates frustrated that they didn’t get to weigh in on particular topics. That frustration — and stress from knowing that it’s time for the field to narrow down — boiled over at various points, with way too many stretches of crosstalk and auditory chaos. Also, have all those voices calling for using the U.S. military to take direct action against drug cartels on foreign soil thought this through? Nobody’s watched or read Clear and Present Danger lately, huh?
A Stage Full of Chaos
As I said to Jack Butler on the National Review live-blog, I don’t think last night’s Republican presidential-primary debate on Fox News was poorly run. But multi-candidate primary-debate organizers face a persistent structural problem. If you ask every candidate to weigh in on the same topic, you often end up with seven candidates giving more or less the same answer — “I’m determined to secure the border.” “When I’m president, America will have a secure border.” “Everybody says they’re going to secure the border, but I’m the one you can count on to do it.” There are exceptions, but by and large, all Republican candidates want to do roughly the same things, and just have slightly different ideas of how to do it. Even if they have differences in the details, it’s not easy to explain those details in 60 seconds.
The alternative is to do what Fox News did last night, which is to ask questions on a particular topic to a handful of candidates, and then move on to another topic when you turn to the remaining candidates. The debate began with the moderators asking South Carolina senator Tim Scott, Vivek Ramaswamy, former vice president Mike Pence, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum about the United Auto Workers strike, but by the time the moderators were ready for former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Florida governor Ron DeSantis, they turned to the topic of the potential government shutdown and populist Republicans.
The problem is that not every candidate gets to weigh in on every issue, and the odds are good that a candidate who isn’t asked about a particular topic will get irked that they’ve spent all that time memorizing and perfecting, say, a 30-second description of their energy plan and a good zinger, and they don’t even get to use it.
So last night had a lot of “Before I answer that question, I want to go back to the topic we were discussing a few moments ago” exchanges, meaning that candidates would try to make a point or two about the topic from a few minutes ago, and then attempt to squeeze in an answer to the asked question in whatever meager time was left.
You also figure at least some of those candidates felt intense pressure to grab camera time last night. In the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, Burgum is at nine-tenths of 1 percent, Christie is at 2.7 percent, Scott is at 2.8 percent, and Pence is at 4.2 percent. To be on stage for the third debate, a candidate needs to have 70,000 individual donors and hit 4 percent in either two national polls, or one national poll and two polls from separate early states. Last night was likely make-or-break for a bunch of lower-tier candidates.
As Michael Brendan Dougherty observed last night, “I think that incredibly confusing and existentially demoralizing confrontation between Scott and Haley is a sign that the pressure from donors to winnow the field is coming and they know it.” From the beginning of the race, observers have doubted there were enough non-Trump Republican voters and enough money to sustain both Haley and Scott through the South Carolina primary on February 24. And MBD was right that the clash was confusing and frustrating. Maybe you love Haley, or maybe you hate her, but do you make your decision about her based upon how much the curtains cost at the official residence of the ambassador to the United Nations? It was some Obama administration official’s decision to spend $52,701 on curtains anyway, a choice made before Haley was in the position. For a senator with a nice-guy reputation, that was a cheap shot by Scott.
Candidates were eager to jump in and respond to what their rivals had said, and the result was a lot of crosstalk. Everybody loses when there’s crosstalk, and it’s odd and irritating that candidates don’t recognize this. No one can easily understand what the candidates are saying, the talking candidates look rude, the moderators look like they’re losing control, the viewers at home get annoyed and tempted to change the channel, and the network grinds its teeth at the thought of losing viewers.
I think future debates may need to cut the microphones of candidates who descend into the auditory chaos of crosstalk. Candidates just get louder, convinced they’re going to somehow shame the other candidate into stopping talking.
The other tough challenge for any debate organizer and moderator is: Inevitably, some candidates are serious competitors for the nomination, and some are longshots or no-hopers. Should you give the longshots or no-hopers as much time and attention as the main attractions? If you do that, some viewers will understandably grumble that they tuned in to see what, say, Ron DeSantis had to say, and they keep getting more servings of Doug Burgum. Networks can justifiably argue their role isn’t to give the longshots a leg up. But if you don’t allocate time equally, some will justifiably accuse you of playing favorites and being unfair.
As for who won . . . if you’re a candidate who is widely thought of as a nice guy, you had a night that was fine on the merits but didn’t do enough for you. Doug Burgum, Tim Scott, Mike Pence — these are all good guys and if they somehow ended up in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk, they would probably do fine jobs.
As Dominic observed, Burgum clearly knows energy policy backward and forward.
Scott offered a succinct and powerful sermon about the distinction between experiencing racism in America and concluding America is a racist country:
Black families survived slavery. We survived poll taxes and literacy tests. We survived discrimination being woven into the laws of our country. What was hard to survive, was Johnson’s Great Society, where they decided to take the black father out of the household to get a check in the mail, and you can now measure that in unemployment, in crime, in devastation. If you want to restore hope, you’ve got to restore the family, restore capitalism, and put Americans back at work, together as one American family. Our nation continues to go in the right direction, it’s why I can say I have been discriminated against, but America is not a racist country. Never, ever, doubt who we are. We are the greatest country on God’s green earth.
And Mike Pence . . . well, apparently, he thinks that a Florida judge sentencing the Parkland mass shooter to life in prison is evidence that Florida governor DeSantis is soft on crime. (Note the irony that the Florida Supreme Court reprimanded the judge in that case for “giving, at times, the appearance of partiality to the prosecution.”) Pence wants an “expedited death penalty” for mass shooters — who are often suicidal — and he wants us to know he’s been sleeping with a teacher for 38 years.
Chris Christie turned in the kind of performance we’ve grown used to — blunt, direct, occasionally funny, occasionally a little too cute and pleased with himself, like his designation of the debate-phobic former president as “Donald Duck.” Christie’s bid still has the same key problems. Republicans had the option of him in 2016 and didn’t choose him, and now Christie is the same guy, reinvented as an outspoken Trump critic.
Still, it was good to have Christie there to intermittently remind the rest of the field that Trump is the front-runner and they really ought to be attacking him, rather than one another.
Nikki Haley was fabulously feisty last night — maybe a little too feisty. After she snapped, at Ramaswamy, “Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber from what you say,” I thought that was just enough, but she just kept on going, tangling with everybody else on stage except Burgum. At one point she ripped into Scott for being ineffective in the Senate: “Twelve years? Where have you been, Tim? Where have you been? We have been waiting!” If Haley really thinks Scott has been a giant disappointment, she should blame the governor who appointed him to the U.S. Senate back in 2012.
But if Haley was too feisty, she seemed to have the clearest sense of what she needed to do last night. If someone else besides Trump is going to be the GOP nominee, there needs to be one remaining non-Trump option against Trump as soon as possible. If everybody stays in, Trump will romp to victory easily. It’s not enough for an aspiring GOP nominee to have a nice debate night; you need to have a night so good that it prompts other non-Trump candidates to drop out.
There is only going to be one last non-Trump candidate standing, and Haley is determined to be it. With some candidates like Burgum, it’s easy to walk away with the feeling, “He’s a good governor, but I don’t see why he should be president or why he’s running.” With Haley, you know, in every exchange, she is in it to win it and is going to leave it all out on the field.
Ron DeSantis appears to be pursuing a deliberate, methodical strategy, and when this primary is done, it’s either going to look ingenious and unorthodox, or it’s going to look way too passive. He seemed content to wait for his turn and didn’t speak for the first 16 minutes. He didn’t seem interested in scrapping with the others too much. DeSantis’s answers last night were all fine and felt like 60-second tapas servings of his stump speech. He had an important moment standing up for pro-lifers and had a near-ideal moment where he talked about what made him choose to serve in the military after 9/11, which generated spontaneous applause from the audience at the Reagan Library. And DeSantis might have stumbled across the most effective contrast with his rivals on stage — that they’re all fine folks, but, as Ramesh put it, he’s “the only one who has gotten in the big fights and gotten big wins for the people.” We can debate what qualifies as a “big fight” or a “big win,” but when you look at Florida’s pandemic policies and keeping the state open, the state’s parental-rights-in-education legislation, and tackling the Disney corporation, it’s safe to say DeSantis takes big swings, and often gets bigger hits as a result.
Last night, over on the Washington Post live blog, I wrote, “If you turn down the sound while Vivek Ramaswamy is on screen, I remain convinced that I’m watching a 1990s late-night infomercial for a 12-CD set that will help me unlock my personal power and learn the 10 steps to transformative growth — and the free bonus pamphlet “Imaginomics: Turning Thought into Money.”
It is now abundantly clear that just about every other candidate on stage — all of whom have actually served in elected office and gotten laws changed — hates Ramaswamy’s guts. They look at him and see a shallow, ill-informed, slick snake-oil salesman, and have absolutely zero respect for him. Pass the popcorn, because I am here for it.
Ramaswamy’s declaration that “just because Vladimir Putin is evil doesn’t mean that Ukraine is good” is a damnable insult to everybody over there who is ducking and covering in air-raid shelters, exhuming bodies from mass graves, and fighting and bleeding and dying on the eastern front. Go over there and tell all those people that they’re not good, you morally backward ignorant little twerp.
By the standards of a presidential candidate, Ramaswamy had a bad night and got knocked around like a pinata. But there’s a good chance that Ramaswamy is playing a different game than everyone else. Being “the heel” is a surefire way to be the center of attention, and last night’s biggest storyline was, arguably, “Everybody Hates Vivek.” As a potential future primetime host of Fox News Channel, he had a great night.
ADDENDUM: A point from our Mark Wright last night:
I don’t agree with Nikki Haley on the merits regarding U.S. military intervention in Mexico — involving the U.S. in a shooting war south of the border is the definition of opening a Pandora’s box of unknown and unpredictable consequences — but she presents the best argument for it.
I don’t think that it’s just because I’ve watched Clear and Present Danger a bunch of times that I hope we have exceptionally clear objectives, plans, and terms of engagement for this proposal — including how we define victory, and when we would declare the operation complete and over. Because this proposal sounds like a messy, dirty war against transnational criminal organizations known for their exceptional ruthlessness and brutality, that also have exceptional practice at sneaking into our country. You think we have hostage crises now? Roughly 1.6 million Americans live in Mexico, and tens of millions of U.S. tourists go there each year. If a cartel wants to make retaliatory attacks against American civilians, it will have a near-limitless supply of easy targets.
Cartels are indisputably evil and violent, a menace, an enemy of the United States and its people. But their primary objective is almost always to make a profit. They’re not “at war” with us in the way that a traditional terrorist group is. The cartels aren’t out to topple our government or establish a theocracy. They’re more akin to the mafia.
Look, if someone can point to compelling evidence that sending a cruise missile into some cartel chief’s mansion really will make a serious and lasting dent in the drug trade, I’m all for it. This wouldn’t be the first time that U.S. military forces have played a role in the war on drugs.
But our experience in the drug war has been that taking out one kingpin creates a messy fight among the underlings and lieutenants to fill the power vacuum, followed by the gradual emergence of another kingpin. This doesn’t mean we stop attempting to arrest, capture, prosecute, and incarcerate kingpins. But it’s a question of which tool is most effective for achieving our objective. Using the military to blow up drug labs or bases of operation isn’t quite like trying to use a sledgehammer to kill a fly, it’s more like using a flamethrower to kill mosquitos. I mean, you might get them, but you’re going to create a lot of new problems in the process.
Cartels have risen to power in large part because of America’s now multi-generational appetite for these drugs. Even if you blow up a chunk of the supply, you still have the problem of the demand.
Also, do we envision taking this U.S. military action on foreign soil with or without the cooperation of the countries’ governments? Are we doing this in defiance of these countries’ governments? Do you think the Mexican government and other governments in the region are sufficiently cooperative now? Just how cooperative do you think these governments will be on anything — including migration and enforcement of borders — if we start bombing targets in their countries against their will? Are we willing to occupy any territory in the course of executing these operations?
Are you starting to see how this could get very complicated and difficult to end, very quickly?
How can so many voters in the current GOP electorate be convinced that interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were catastrophic failures that cost the country far too much in blood in treasure, and sending arms to Ukraine is a terrible waste with no moral dimension or geopolitical upside, but using U.S. military forces to launch a war against drug cartels in Mexico and Central America is going to be easy-peasy?