Everything Worth Knowing About GOP Debate Number Whatever
Tuesday night there was another Republican presidential debate. I don’t know which one. Like eating four pieces out of a family bucket of chicken, it’s somewhere past too many and still short of halfway there, and you will be dead by the end.
This was Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus’ plan. He didn’t want a repeat of 2012’s endless march of debates, where the issues became a meaningless background hum, while moderators brainstormed novel ways of surprising candidates, and casual fans and politicos alike only watched for the gaffes. No, this time, it was going to be simpler, fewer, with a quicker resolution and a candidate around which the party could coalesce.
The result, however, has been the worst of both worlds. The debate process won’t go on long enough for every candidate to eventually experience a berserker-crazy breakdown moment via rage or exhaustion, but it’s already gone on long enough that no sane person could possibly stand to watch another one.
You already know what the Republican candidates believe in. The party is a collection of begged questions, tautology, nativism, existential paranoia, flagrantly imaginary mathemagic and urban legends about an actor. Anything else is an anecdote about someone a candidate “met” in some place “back home” or “in the Heartland” that is “totally not made up.”
You can learn everything about these people after one debate, and even that is probably more than enough. Really, Reince should just staple a bunch of flash cards saying the same thing to the front of each podium, then staple a different wig on the top of it. Americans could vote for the most compelling wig by texting “President” to different numbers. This sounds crass until you listen to Ben Carson and realize that he is dumber than a sack of hair.
As is customary, the Junior Varsity debate seemed wholly less unreasonable than the main event to follow. Gone were fatally abortion-tolerant George Pataki and the endlessly quotable Lindsey Graham, and in their place stood Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie, both demoted from the big stage.
The highlights were few. Rick Santorum again struck one of the most populist notes by arguing for good jobs for people out of high school, not college, as part of his call for a revival of Rust Belt America. He also cited his record of winning elections in a blue state by omitting his last election, in which he was defeated by 17 percent. Huckabee also went to the populist well, defending Social Security and Medicare, stating, “Those are not entitlements, and those are not welfare. That’s an earned benefit.” Then he soured things by claiming the War on Poverty “was designed” to have a “poverty industry so the people in the poverty industry could have jobs.” So that explains the Head Start program, a Trojan horse designed to screw poor people in order to insidiously grant a subspecies of public pimps one of the most casually reviled jobs in America. Then he proposed aiding Syrian refugees by somehow determining how endangered each one is, then putting them in “encampments.”