On the menu today: We’re now a week into December, so perhaps it is fitting that the final Republican presidential-primary debate of this year — and maybe of the entire cycle — turned into a Festivus-style “airing of the grievances.” Ron DeSantis wants us to believe that Nikki Haley is a spineless squish who always folds, Haley wants us to believe DeSantis is just jealous because Wall Street donors have abandoned him in favor of her, Chris Christie declared that Vivek Ramaswamy is “the most obnoxious blowhard in America” with his “smart-ass Harvard mouth,” and Ramaswamy stopped about one step short of declaring that everyone else on stage was a lizard person. (“The puppet masters put up their puppet!”) Remember how I said the last debate was worth watching? Despite the best efforts of the moderators, this one was a mud fight and a circus. But I suspect Donald Trump enjoyed it. Yesterday, I echoed Dr. Phil: If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’re going to keep getting what you’re getting. How is that working out for these challengers to Trump?
This Format of Debating Has Run Its Course
We’ve now watched roughly eight hours of debating among the Republican Party’s presidential candidates. You residents of Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina really should have more than enough information about the candidates by now. They’ve been stopping by your neck of the woods quite regularly for much of the past year. They’ve all done plenty of interviews, on television and the web, on radio, and in print. And last night, we got two solid hours of four of the last five candidates who are still standing*: Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, and Vivek Ramaswamy. No more interruptions from Doug Burgum telling us how they do things back in North Dakota, Tim Scott sounding like a preacher, or Mike Pence furrowing his brow in concern.
And this might be all the primary debates we get to see. No one knows if the Republican National Committee, which regularly operates as a minor subsidiary of the presidential campaign run out of Mar-a-Lago, wants to have another one before the Iowa Republican caucus, held January 15, 2024.
I think my colleague Jeff Blehar’s assessment is correct: There was a certain bitterness and damn-the-torpedoes attitude on display Wednesday night, particularly from Ramaswamy and Christie, as they both know there’s a good chance that this is the last time they’ll appear before a national audience as presidential candidates.
Ramaswamy charged, “I think those with foreign-policy experience — one thing that Joe Biden and Nikki Haley have in common — is that neither of them could even state for you three provinces in Eastern Ukraine that they want to send our troops to actually fight for.”
When has Haley — or President Biden, for that matter — called for sending U.S. troops to fight against Russia in Ukraine?
I’ve looked, and I cannot find a statement from Haley indicating that position. If Haley had called for deploying U.S. troops to Ukraine to fight the Russians, people would have noticed, and it would be a big deal. Way back near the beginning of the war, 27 former ambassadors, Department of Defense officials, and other foreign-policy thinkers called for NATO to enforce a limited no-fly zone, but Haley did not sign that petition, nor has the Biden administration responded to it.
Not even the Ukrainians are calling for U.S. troops to fight for Ukraine. Trust me, I’ve talked to some Ukrainians. This is an extremely personal fight for them, and they don’t want to outsource the job of vengeance for their raped and murdered family members. All they want from us is the tools to finish the job. We can argue about what kinds of weapons we can spare and how much to send, but that necessary debate is muddied when Ramaswamy gets up there and furiously denounces a proposal that no one is seriously offering.
(By the way, Ramaswamy, if we’re going to turn this debate into “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?” they’re called oblasts, not provinces. I assume the Eastern Ukrainian Oblasts he was asking about were Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. This is a bit like the time that George W. Bush was “nailed” for not knowing the name of Pakistan’s head of state. Within a few years, Bush and Pervez Musharraf had a really close working relationship! You know, if you’re president, you can look at a map and check the names of oblasts or provinces. They’ll put that stuff in the presidential daily briefing for you. I mean, is the strongest argument against Haley really that the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations is somehow insufficiently knowledgeable about geography?)
Anyway, Ramaswamy furiously denounced Haley for a position she has never taken, and then went back to the same well later, claiming, “This is a woman who will send your kids to die so she can buy a bigger house.” It’s not just that he accuses her of having a position she has never espoused; he ascribes to her the most evil and malevolent conceivable motive for having that position.
And that’s one of the reasons I feel like this debate generated more noise and histrionics than anything useful. Ramaswamy was up there to tear everybody else down, often with accusations that were at odds with the facts. He had the spectacular audacity to claim that the other three candidates “have been licking Donald Trump’s boots for years.” He sneered at Christie, “do everybody a favor, just walk yourself off that stage, enjoy a nice meal, and get the hell out of this place.” He held up a hand-written “Nikki = Corrupt” sign and shouted, “The puppet masters put up their puppet!” He said the Capitol Hill riot of “Jan. 6 now does look like it was an inside job.” I used to think that Ramaswamy was angling for the jobs of Jesse Watters or Sean Hannity. Judging from his behavior and comments last night, Ramaswamy really wants Alex Jones’s gig. It was a bit like watching Carrot Top spliced into an old episode of Firing Line. He brought to the stage all the decorum and dignity of a feces-flinging howler monkey.
I’m a really big fan of Megyn Kelly and Eliana Johnson; I don’t know Elizabeth Vargas. But I think these moderators could have used a slightly firmer hand with the candidates on stage. I suspect there was a deliberate decision to let the candidates keep going, even if they started name-calling or getting personal with one another. The moderators may well have believed this was the best way for the audience to see the candidates under pressure, and there’s a certain logic to that.
Your mileage may vary, but that didn’t do much for me. In fact, as these debates progress, I find myself wishing that we could watch the candidates sitting around a table, without an audience, and without interruptions for applause.
The moderators brought up big, meaty topics that really require more than 60 seconds to lay out a coherent plan. Take border security and drugs, for example.
Just about every Republican wants a secure border and to stop illegal immigrants and illegal drugs from coming into the country. Sure, lots of Republican voters liked Trump’s promise of a border wall, but Trump only built 52 miles of new wall and repaired and upgraded about 400 miles more. Clearly, just wanting to do it and being president isn’t enough. You need to get Congress to appropriate the funds, and you need to ensure U.S. Customs and Border Protection actually completes the construction in a timely manner.
This is where the debate could be genuinely useful, if the moderators could get the candidates to talk, specifically, about what they would do differently than what Trump did from 2017 to 2021 — something more than, “I’m gonna get it done!” Okay, how? What are you going to do differently than the previous Republican president?
But getting the candidates to pause, take a deep breath, and speak in paragraphs about policy specifics is just about impossible in this setup. Instead, the candidates are trying to unleash zingers or attempting to work in some overdramatized applause lines.
“How to deal with the rise of China” is another complicated topic that doesn’t fit well into 60-second or 90-second answers and doesn’t lend itself well to applause lines. The answers usually amount to, “We’re going to send a really clear signal to Beijing.”
Christie tried to hit DeSantis for not immediately saying he would authorize a rescue mission for the American hostages held by Hamas. But without knowing any specifics about that hypothetical scenario, we can’t really evaluate whether that’s a good idea, and whether the candidate is authorizing the next Operation Eagle Claw — the unsuccessful operation to rescue American hostages held in Iran in 1980 — or a successor to the successful hostage-rescue operations in recent years. Hostage-rescue missions are extremely difficult; if the bad guys see the good guys coming, they often kill the hostages.
If Ron DeSantis is your favorite candidate, you probably think he won the debate. If Nikki Haley is your favorite candidate, you probably think she won the debate. If Vivek Ramaswamy is your favorite candidate, you probably really enjoy professional wrestling**. If Chris Christie is your favorite candidate . . . okay, before I go any further, is there anybody out there who really likes Christie more than any other option? If so, you’re pretty rare. Christie is at 2.5 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of national polling. For perspective, Tim Scott, who suspended his campaign November 12, is still at 2 percent.
Assuming you Christie fans exist, you want the 2024 Republican presidential primary to be a referendum on Donald Trump, and you want the GOP to reject Trump. I think it is safe to say that’s not going to happen. A lot of the Republicans who staunchly oppose Trump are either formally or informally independents now. Trump attracted previously apolitical types who like his style into the GOP, and repelled the nice soccer moms and white-collar suburbanites who find him abhorrent.
Former prosecutor Christie did offer an eye-opening observation or prediction in his closing remarks, declaring that if Trump is the nominee, he won’t be able to vote for himself in November 2024 because he will be a convicted felon by then. Alas, as far as we can tell, roughly half the Republican Party sees nothing troubling about that scenario.
*Yeah, Asa Hutchinson is still out there. He’s holding a town hall at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, today.
**No offense intended, professional-wrestling fans. That sport has been good to my family.
ADDENDA: Lord, grant me the confidence of a 38-year-old tech bro who has never been elected to a darn thing, who thinks he’s going to walk into a room with Xi Jinping, intimidate the dictator who rules China with an iron fist, and tell him how it’s going to be.
Busy day today, as I’m scheduled to appear on Fox News in the late morning, and Megyn Kelly’s podcast in the early afternoon.
Over in the Washington Post, I take a look at Kevin McCarthy’s forthcoming resignation from Congress, and how Donald Trump’s plan for federal teacher certification is so bad that even the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts calls it “a terrible idea.” Elsewhere, the right-of-center columnists live-blogged the debate.
Certain folks would like you to boycott the Washington Post today. I’m not in the union, and I suspect you aren’t either, so as far as I’m concerned, you can visit the site all you like.