My thoughts on the second GOP debate(s)

CNN hosted two Republican debates at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library last night.  Like the Fox News debate held in Cleveland last month this was meant to be considered one debate broken up into two rounds, but when you have a completely different set of people on the stage for each round it effectively becomes two debates.

I guess you could say that Bobby Jindal won the 6 PM debate, but the whole thing felt like a waste of time to me.  Jindal tried to strike a balance between speaking to the base much in the same way that Ted Cruz does while still being willing to denounce Donald Trump, Rick Santorum's foreign policy chops were overshadowed by his sanctimony and his naked appeals to economically illiterate Trump voters, Lindsey Graham stuck to his usual shtick of trying to be some strange General Patton/Andy Griffith hybrid, and George Pataki was just sort of there (I honestly can't remember a single word he said).

Every candidate in the 8 PM debate had at least one good moment but Carly Fiorina was the candidate that really stood out as the winner.  She's someone who not only does her homework but is very good at thinking on her feet, and it showed last night.  No matter what question was asked she always seemed to find a way to turn her answer into a blistering attack, but she never once resorted to the sort of third-grade insults used by Trump.

Marco Rubio did well for himself too, but not quite as well as he did in the Fox debate, I think.  He knows his stuff, and he's very good at explaining things without it sounding like he's giving a speech, but last night he just didn't get in the kind of broadsides that we saw from Fiorina.  (I also could've done without his lame water bottle joke, but that's a minor complaint.)

I don't know if he'll be punished in the polls for it or not but Donald Trump's performance in last night's debate was pretty terrible, even for him.  Sure, he did have a few moments where he seemed almost human, but mostly he stuck to non sequiturs and random insults, or blatant lies about his previous random insults; and for some strange reason he still seems utterly determined to remain as uninformed on matters of foreign policy as he possibly can.

For the most part Ben Carson seemed much more comfortable giving more specific answers in this debate than he did at the Fox debate, but he still seems out of his depth on foreign policy and at times even dangerously naive.  At one point he seemed to suggest that President Bush should have used "the bully pulpit" to do some unspecified thing instead of invading Afghanistan after 9/11--not the kind of answer serious people want to hear from a potential Commander in Chief.

Chris Christie came off as a serious guy for most of the night, as he did in the Fox debate, but at other times he seemed like he was trying too hard to act like he was the only adult in the room and I found it a bit off-putting.  If you want to be seen as Mr. Serious you can't be overbearing about it.  I do have a lot of problems with him as a candidate but I haven't written him off yet.

We know who John Kasich is now so he no longer has the benefit of low expectation, and he no longer has his adoring fans from Ohio in the audience to cheer him on.  He pretty much fell flat last night.  I find Kasich a bit tedious at this point, frankly.  He kept interrupting everyone else on the stage but never seemed to have much of anything to say.  Also, his explanation of why he wants to keep the Iran deal in place was so dumb that it made my head hurt.

I like that Scott Walker pushed back a little bit on how all the questions were about Trump, but ultimately it didn't change anything.  The dumb questions just kept coming and coming.  I like Walker, but his campaign has been an absolute mess so far and he's just too subdued in these debates.

Rand Paul was much less aggressive here than he was in the Fox debate; he had a chance to get into a big fight with Trump while defending Carly Fiorina but he gave up and just rolled his eyes instead.  Other than that minor skirmish, the only things I can even remember hearing from him last night was more of the usual anti-war stuff and pro-marijuana stuff.

Ted Cruz still sounds way too rehearsed to me, and way too focused on speaking only to the base.  I don't know why he has a reputation for being such a great debater.   And of course he didn't say one bad word about Trump, as usual.  He seems to think that if he keeps playing footsie with Trump that he'll just somehow magically end up with all of Trump's supporters.

Jeb Bush was just as uninspiring in this debate as he was in the Fox debate.  Well, he did have one good line where he defended his brother by saying that he kept us safe, but that was it.  I just don't think Jeb has it in him to show us that he's anything other than Mr. Establishment.  He doesn't even really have the perception that he's the default not-Trump guy going for him anymore.

Huckabee was Huckabee.  He had a few good lines but mostly he was just there taking up space.  I still can't believe he gave up a television show for this.

My thoughts on the first GOP debate(s)

Well, it looks like it's debate season again.  Fox News hosted two Republican debates in Cleveland, Ohio last night.  Technically, it was supposed to be considered one debate, but it was broken up into two parts, with the second-tier candidates debating at 5 PM and the main debate happening at 9 PM.

I was disappointed that Rick Perry (who IMHO actually has the best record to run on) wasn't included in the primetime debate, but I thought the more easygoing pace of the less crowded 5 PM debate served him well; whether Perry can do well enough in a debate to stop the grumbling of people still sore at him for his lackluster 2012 debate performance remains to be seen.

The consensus seems to be that Carly Fiorina was the winner of the 5 PM debate; Perry practically endorsed her himself in the middle of his answer to a question about Iran.  Fiorina has a lot of great moments but my favorite was the shot she took at Trump--the kind of shot that Perry should've taken but didn't.  I only wish I could've seen the look on Trump's face when she did it.

Bobby Jindal may look good on paper to a lot of people, but I don't think he's a very good at talking about his record; he keeps switching back and forth between speaking too fast and trying not to sound like he's speaking too fast, and it sometimes makes it hard to follow what he's saying.

George Pataki, Rick Santorum, and Lindsey Graham all left me cold; none of these three really felt to me like they even belonged there.  I don't remember much of what Jim Gilmore said, but I don't remember actively disliking him or feeling like he was somehow out of place.

I'm not sure if there was a clear winner of the primetime debate, but the biggest loser was definitely Donald Trump.  Right off the bat he refused to pledge not to run as a third party candidate if someone else won the GOP nomination.  Later in the debate Trump hurt himself again by giving a strange answer to a question about single payer healthcare in which he praised the healthcare systems in Canada and Scotland, said some stuff about buying insurance across state lines here in the US, and seemed careful to not entirely rule out wanting single payer as part of a replacement for Obamacare.  All throughout the debate most of Trump's answers were really not much better than word salad, and often he would be given an extra thirty seconds to clarify his garbled answers.  (And of course after the debate was over he blamed Fox News for his pathetic performance because nothing is ever his fault.)

Marco Rubio seemed to make the best use of his time overall and had a very strong close; I tend to prefer executive experience in a candidate, but I have to admit he's very good at speaking without sounding like he's speechifying.  (There will always be those who write Rubio off as an amnesty shill, but even Donald Trump for all his ranting and raving about border security always manages to leave the door open to some sort of amnesty whenever directly asked about it.)

Jeb Bush went into this debate being known by most people as the Establishment guy or the default not-Trump pick, and I don't think he really did much to convince people that he was anything more than those things.  I didn't find him very inspiring and not much of anything he said really stuck with me after the debate was over.  There was an awkward moment where he declined to take credit for calling Trump an asshole, and then Trump called him a gentleman afterward, which probably made a few heads explode on both sides.

Ted Cruz has a reputation for being an excellent debater but he sounded a bit too rehearsed to me, and most of his answers felt like little speeches. He also has a tendency to sound like he's speaking only to the base even when he's trying not to, which could be a problem for him in the general election if he ever manages to win the nomination.

Rand Paul tried to stand out by getting into a few shouting matches but his shrill voice always makes him sound like he's desperately flailing even when he actually has the better argument.  I don't think he did himself any favors.

Ben Carson did a good job of using humor to try to connect with people, but he didn't really offer any substance along with that humor; his answers tended to meander all over the place without ever finding any specifics.  He's put more thought into his positions than Trump, I'll give him that, but that's not saying much.  Someone who's only running for president because he made Obama uncomfortable for a few minutes at a prayer breakfast really needs to do better than this.

Mike Huckabee is also very good at using humor but I don't think people will ever get over the fact that he's Mike Huckabee.  His record as governor is not a good one, so he only gets so much benefit from saying he has executive experience.  The show he had on Fox may give him a base of support but most people will always think of him as Rick Santorum with a bass guitar and a better sense of humor.

Chris Christie did well for himself.  He had a skirmish with Rand Paul that fans of Paul probably won't forgive him for, but for the most part Christie came across as a serious guy.  I'm still skeptical that someone from a blue state with his temperament and tendency to lash out at his own party can win the nomination.

Scott Walker didn't really stand out, but he didn't make any blunders either.  If he made a mistake at all it was in playing it too safe; it seemed like his answers were shorter than they needed to be at times.  He's really not known as a foreign policy guy but one of his best moments came when he quoted Ronald Reagan while talking about Vladimir Putin.

John Kasich got a lot of praise for doing better than people expected, but that was only because the audience was filled with Ohioans cheering him on and our expectations were so low.  Next time will be a lot harder for him to get that kind of praise, I think, and it will be tough for him to escape being thought of as a more genial version of Jon Huntsman.

Playing by their rules is not always a good idea

Some people on the right have it in their heads that Obama winning the White House has somehow fundamentally changed the nature of politics itself.  I know Obama said he wanted to "fundamentally transform" the country, but I really don't think he's changed the way the GOP will win elections.

Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 hasn't changed the fact that it's been nearly 100 years since a Republican senator has won in a presidential election.  Obama could get away with being a presidential candidate that had an impossibly thin record and the most inane slogans you could ever imagine because the media chose to treat him like a demigod anyway.  Republicans don't have the luxury of being worshipped by the media.  The media only ever gives Republicans glowing coverage when those Republicans are bashing their own party for something, and even then that praise will only last so long; you could be the media's favorite Republican and you'll still be treated like the incarnation of evil the moment you become an obstacle for a Democrat seeking the White House.

You can't spend all day complaining about the media's double standard and then suddenly expect everything to go swimmingly when you try to play by the other side's rules.  Any Republicans seeking higher office should take it as a given that the media will do its level best to tear them apart, and so they need to go the extra mile to make sure they have their shit together before they decide to run.  A Democrat can give one speech and somehow be taken seriously as a presidential candidate, but Republicans need to do more than that.  Giving a good speech or being good in a debate are good skills to have, but they shouldn't be the only skills you have.  Republican candidates need to be good at communicating their ideas in simple and relatable terms, but they also need to be able to show that their ideas work when put into action, which is why governors tend to make better GOP candidates than senators do.  ( People who have their hearts set on nominating a senator will often point to Mitt Romney as a notable exception, but Romney was a governor from a very blue state so he was only going to get so much mileage out of his record there... and Santorum probably would've lost by double digits anyway. )

I'm not saying that it's utterly impossible for the GOP to send a senator to the White House, just that the chances are slimmer than they should be, and when the deck is already stacked against you this much, why risk it?  The media is thoroughly corrupt, probably more corrupt now than it's ever been before.  Our education system is constantly churning out people who don't know how to think for themselves and our culture is constantly finding new ways to fill their heads with left-wing talking points, turning them into millions of people who are basically Democrats by default.  When that's what you're fighting against, there's very little margin of error.  If you really want your favorite senator to be president someday, then maybe you should be telling him to run for governor first before they run for president, or at least be willing to settle for him being on the bottom of the ticket.

( And by the way, speaking of our culture, when Republicans are already perceived as being out of touch, one of the worst ways a Republican can play the "their rules" game is to make yourself look like a culturally ignorant buffoon while throwing around blatantly false allegations of racism. )

The Stupid Party strikes again

Mollie Hemingway has a great piece up at The Federalist explaining what a debacle the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act turned into in the House of Representatives.

Even if you were certain you didn't have the votes to pass it, why pull the bill?  All pulling the bill does is give people the impression that it's extreme when it's actually pretty mainstream; in fact, a virtually identical bill passed the House in 2013 without incident.  Late-term abortion bans always poll extremely well; even many folks who don't call themselves"pro-life" are still in favor of banning late-term abortion.  So why not just hold the vote on this bill regardless of whether or not you think enough votes are there to pass it, and then let whoever is extreme enough to vote against it show themselves for what they are?

Why in the world did Speaker Boehner let this happen?  I want to give the guy a chance, but this is the kind of stupid shit that keeps pushing me into the anti-Boehner camp.  Just take the easy win when you have it, Mr. Speaker!  Please stop trying so hard to find a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  ( I'm glad that he invited Bibi to speak to Congress and all, but I don't think it was part of some master plan of his to give Obama a nervous breakdown, so I can only give him so much credit. And, really, it should've been a no-brainer anyway. )

Many conservatives are calling for Representative Renee Ellmers to be primaried in 2016 as punishment for throwing a spanner into the works with her flip-flop on late-term abortion.  Ace even goes so far as to say that we should vote for her Democrat opponent if she somehow survives a primary challenge.  I used to think such ideas were insane, but I have to admit he makes a surprisingly persuasive argument.

Is this really as bad as it will get?

Writing at The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead suggests that the left may have peaked with the Obama administration.  He makes some good points, but I'm not quite as optimistic as he seems to be.  For one thing, Obama still has two years left in office with no threat of electoral consequences to prevent him from fully embracing the darker angels of our nature, so I expect things to get much worse still before they start to get better; the GOP won big in the midterms, but if they won't stop Obama from sidestepping Congress whenever he feels like it, then how much of a victory was it, really?

Mead is also much more dismissive of Elizabeth Warren's chances than I am.  Yes, she's a leftist kook with a practically nonexistent resume and a partially fabricated bio, but so was Obama; nobody thought anything of Obama either when he ran against presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton in 2008.  Mead thinks it was a unique set of circumstances (mainly Iraq and the financial crisis) that propelled Obama to the White House, but that theory doesn't really explain how Obama got reelected in 2012, does it?  I still think our problems as a country run much deeper than many of us would like to admit.

(Hat tip to @rdbrewer4 for finding Mead's article.)

Will Obama be a problem for Hillary in 2016?

Allahpundit made an interesting observation:

Has anyone let Hillary know, incidentally, that Obama thinks he no longer needs to worry about short-term electoral concerns? Not that executive amnesty is going to hurt her much in 2016—my strong suspicion is that it’ll help, if only in how it confounds GOP candidates—but his track record on improving other Democrats’ electoral chances is … not good. You would think party bigwigs might prefer less of a loose-cannon Obama at this point, if only for her sake, than having him spinning like Julie Andrews on the hilltop, flinging work permits at every illegal who strays by.

I just assumed that Obama would spend the next two years basically being the biggest asshole ever, but it never occurred to me how the presumptive Dem nominee would view Obama's behavior.  Hillary needs to figure out how much she can distance herself from Obama while still trying to claim her abysmal tenure as his Secretary of State as a plus on her résumé; the more strident and unpredictable Obama gets during his last two years in office, the tougher that will be for her to do.  Plus at any moment the media could push her aside and rally behind Elizabeth Warren instead, much the way they rallied behind Obama in 2008.  ( And with Joe Biden in the mix as well, who the hell knows what could happen. )

Where do we go from here?

The midterm elections finally happened, and Republicans did pretty well for themselves.  Republicans retook control of the Senate, added to their seats in the House, and even won some governorships in unexpected places like Illinois and Maryland.  All in all, if you wanted to see the GOP stick its thumb in Obama's eye, Tuesday was a pretty good night.

So, now what?  Once the 114th Congress is sworn in on January 3rd, Harry Reid won't have a stranglehold on the Senate anymore.  Whether the new Senate Majority Leader turns out to be Mitch McConnell or some other Republican, I don't much care, as long as Harry Reid is finally pushed aside.

One thing you can count on is for Obama to be at his absolute pettiest over the next two years.  You think he's been petty so far?  You ain't seen nothing yet.  Whatever little concern he may have had before about electoral consequences is now completely gone.  He's already talking about sidestepping Congress and the new Congress hasn't even been sworn in yet.  Don't be surprised at all if Obama spends the next two years basically daring Congress to impeach him; expect Obama to take more and more executive action of increasingly questionable constitutionality, all while vetoing every single bill that Congress passes.  And the media will cover for him every step of the way, at least until he makes himself a problem for whichever candidate the media wants to nominate in 2016.

As far as 2016 goes, I'm hoping that Republicans will have enough sense to nominate someone who served at least one term as governor of a red or purple state and whose last name isn't Bush.  There are way too many people running who probably shouldn't be.  Ben Carson is a nice guy, and I respect the hell out of the work he's done as a neurosurgeon, but making Obama uncomfortable for two minutes at a prayer breakfast doesn't make you qualified to be president.  No matter how much you might like the speeches given by Rand Paul or Ted Cruz, neither of them has any executive experience.   It's no coincidence that Herbert Hoover was the last time a Republican was elected president without having first served as a governor, general, or vice president.  If Jeb Bush had become governor of Florida a little sooner and then run for president in 2000, he might've had a chance, but he doesn't have a chance in hell of being president now.

The Incredible Shrinking President

I swear, Barack Obama has to be the pettiest person to ever occupy the White House.  He doesn't have an ounce of humility in his whole body.  He's the sort of person who never once heard the word "no" until he was an adult, and now treats even the slightest disagreement as if it were an act of treason or terrorism.  He's the sort of person who can't handle even the most innocuous criticism, but thinks falsely accusing his opponent of giving a woman cancer is just part of the rough and tumble of politics.  He's the sort of person who would send riot police after veterans to keep them out of their own memorials just to add to the pain he wants to scapegoat Republicans for.

Obama really thought that running for president itself would be the only experience he needed to qualify for the job, just because he's so darned special.  Résumés weren't meant for people like him; those are for the little people.  It worked, though.  He got elected.  Twice.  And after five years of being the least presidential president ever, he's still campaigning.  For what, I don't know.  He can't legally run for a third term in 2016 anyway.  It's almost as if his whole presidency has just been a campaign to get his own show on MSNBC.  Why not?  He seems to get pettier with each passing day, and I don't expect him to be any less petty once he's out of office.  He'd fit right in there.

At what point will people begin to hold Obama accountable for his own failures?  Just how petty and vile does the man have to get before people finally see him for what he really is?

Let's not get ahead of ourselves here...

Remember when everyone was in love with Chris Christie because he yelled at some idiot teacher?  Yeah... not so much anymore, huh?  At this point he probably has a better chance of running for president as a Democrat than he does as a Republican.

Just recently I was hearing some folks on the right seriously pushing the idea of Ben Carson running for president in 2016, after hearing the man give only one speech.  He seems like a decent enough fellow, but is that really all it takes these days to get Republicans excited about somebody?  There was a time when Republicans looked at our governorships to find potential candidates with executive experience and a decent record of accomplishments; now it seems like all you have to do is somehow manage to say something vaguely conservative out loud and we all go nuts.

Rand Paul's 13-hour filibuster of the Brennan nomination got Republicans even more excited than Ben Carson did.  I admit it was nice seeing someone spend an entire day holding President Obama's feet to the fire on something, even if it was a bit of a straw man argument.  (Does anyone really think Obama was planning to attempt a drone strike on American citizens on our own soil?)

I do appreciate that the filibuster helped to draw attention to Obama's completely incoherent policy on the use of drones (seriously, why is it ok to blow up random groups of people just to kill one guy, but not ok to throw water on the face of one particular guy?) but I'm not crazy about the idea of Rand Paul running for president in 2016, or 2020, or ever.  I hate so say it, but as incoherent as Obama's policy on drones may be, I'm still much closer to Obama on drones than I am to Rand Paul.  The point of the filibuster was supposedly an objection to one particular very extreme drone scenario, but after all of Rand Paul's talk about "perpetual war" I really wonder if there is any drone scenario that he wouldn't object to.  Rand may not be his father, but he's still his father's son.

Call me a RINO.  Call me a neocon.  Call me whatever you want.  I'm never going to be comfortable with the idea of a presidential candidate that comes from the Code Pink wing of the Republican Party.  I'm glad that Rand Paul is in the Senate, but that's as far as it goes; anyone who would vote to confirm Chuck Hagel has no business being commander-in-chief.

(By the way, please don't read any of this as a defense of John McCain and Lindsey Graham.  I think they are both idiots.)