Republicans Debate Again

For the fourth time, or maybe it was the four hundredth time, a bunch of Republicans who are not going to be president got together to "debate" while (largely) pretending that the 800-pound gorilla in the room doesn't exist. If you want to watch it, you can do so here. You could also re-watch any of the other Republican candidates' debates; they're pretty much interchangeable at this point.

Reader K.H. in Golden, CO, wrote in with this suggestion:

I, for one, would like to excuse (V) and (Z) from having to watch a ridiculous debate on a ridiculous network with ridiculous moderators for ridiculous candidates and then provide us with takes and comments. Instead, I suggest that (if you don't have a subscription) you grab a 7-day trial on Hulu, watch 3 episodes of the 1980's screwball dramedy Moonlighting and give us your rundown on those. It's just as ridiculous, but it's a lot more fun and you will get to listen to some awesome soundtrack music, clever overlapping dialogue, intriguing (if impossible) plots, and, of course, the incredibly delightful theme song sung by the inimitable Al Jarreau.

It's tempting, though if we were going to revisit a 1980s show, we might be more inclined to pick Coach (great acting carried a concept of only moderate merit) or maybe The Wonder Years. Though who knows; (Z) was a big fan of Family Ties during its original run, but when he caught a few episodes several weeks back, he discovered it does not hold up. At all.

In any event, when you commit to a career in academia, and all the benefits therein—the glittering parties, the enormous salary, the women and/or men throwing themselves at you on a daily basis, the Italian sports cars—you also sign up to do some things you would rather not do in the advancement of human knowledge. So, we did our duty last night and watched 2 hours of paint drying... er, prattling from people who are in a heated race for second place.

There are few enough moving parts at this point that we can just take a look at each of them. So:

• The Moderators: We had no expectations that the trio of Megyn Kelly, Eliana Johnson and Elizabeth Vargas would perform well. And despite that, they were still a disappointment.
  
  Usually, the big problem is that the moderators can't maintain discipline. Certainly, that was an issue last night, although not in the most common way, which is candidates shouting over each other. The candidates did talk over each other a fair bit, though it wasn't as bad as some of the other debates. The bigger symptom of the lack of discipline is that, to a greater or lesser extent, the candidates were allowed to seize the stage as they saw fit. So, for example, Nikki Haley might say something, and when she finished Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) would jump in, and then after that Vivek Ramaswamy would pipe up, and then it might circle back to Haley. There were several extended periods where the moderators were just spectators, with no role in managing the proceedings.
  
  Further, as is par for the course for these things, the moderators didn't make any meaningful effort to be politically neutral. The majority of the questions presumed that the Republican takes on things—gender-affirming care is harmful, global warming has been overblown, Israel is the only victim in the Middle East, the border is out of control—are just "the facts." And the only time they turned to an outsider for questions, it was Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch. That's no different from talking to a high-ranking member of the Federalist Society.
  
  All of this said, the biggest problem was that the moderators asked wordy, long-winded questions. In academia, people do that at colloquia and other such events because they want to show off how smart they are. We don't know what the moderators were trying to accomplish, but what we do know—and this is really Political Interviewing 101—is that if you ask a politician unfocused questions, you are opening the door to the respondent just saying whatever they want to say, without answering the substance of the question (or, quite often, any of the question). This happened constantly last night.
  
  Oh, and secondary to that issue, but related, was that the moderators read their questions off of what must have been index cards. And somehow, although they all have broadcast experience, none of them could do proper live reads off the cards. The result was that their reads not only used incorrect inflection much of the time, but they were full of inappropriate pauses. Think something like: "Joe Biden has failed to secure... the border, so that there is a stream of... immigrants and fentanyl coming across the... border on a regular basis. What would... you do differently?" Megyn Kelly was particularly bad in this way.
  
  
• DeSantis: If we read a story tomorrow in which someone claimed that DeSantis was too ill to attend the debate, and so sent a robot in his stead, we must admit that we wouldn't be 100% able to call B.S.
  
  Yes, DeSantis is usually wooden, but last night was as bad as he's ever been. He also couldn't figure out what to do with his hands; sometimes he'd hold them by his side, sometimes he'd clutch them in front of himself, sometimes he'd pat his pockets like he was checking to see if he'd lost his wallet. Pro tip, Ron: use them to grip the podium.
  
  The most robotic part of Ron-Bot's performance, however, was that he just repeated the same exact talking points from the previous debates, using virtually the same verbiage, including the same exact anecdotes. For example, he repeated the story about the toddler who died because they got their hands on some fentanyl at an Airbnb. Did he forget that he already used that story? Did he think the viewers would forget? Or, after two debates in a week (the other, of course, with Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-CA), does he just not care, and so he's mailing it in? Whatever it is, in a night full of boring people, he was the King of the Bores. And we refuse to believe that he flipped even a single vote last night.
  
  Actually, it's entirely possible that DeSantis might have lost some support, in particular among conservative Jewish voters. There was a point in the debate where the candidates were talking about antisemitism, and DeSantis said that antisemitism was as bad today in Germany as it was in the time of Hitler, and that is because Germany keeps letting so many foreigners into the country. Let that sink in for a moment. DeSantis' solution to the problem of antisemitism is for Germany to pursue a policy of national purity and monoculturism? In other words, he wants to follow the roadmap of... Adolf Hitler? We don't know what the heck was going on there—maybe there was a software glitch—but we suspect that some viewers are going to pick up on the white supremacist and, ironically, antisemitic undertones of that remark.
  
  
• Ramaswamy: Story time. Several years ago, before it closed its doors, (Z) visited the Liberace Museum Collection in Las Vegas. That museum was basically built around three things: (1) a diorama of Liberace's life, (2) a collection of Liberace's pianos, and (3) a display of several dozen of Liberace's costumes. And roughly the fifth costume (Z) saw was this one:
  
  
  
  For the record, that is a red-sequined cutaway coat with ribbon epaulets and rhinestone stars, blue-sequined hot pants with rhinestone ornaments, a rhinestone shirt, a rhinestone bowtie and a lace cravat. And (Z)'s response on seeing this was to marvel: "My God, Liberace was brilliant. While maintaining at least some level of public doubt about his sexuality, he managed to out-gay Freddie Mercury, Elton John and Mr. Blackwell... combined. That is undoubtedly the gayest outfit ever created!"
  
  And then, (Z) moved onto the next outfit, which was this:
  
  
  
  Those are satin pants, rhinestone shirt, an even bigger and lacier cravat, a rhinestone brooch, and a pink feather boa overcoat with pink ostrich feather shoulder decorations. And (Z)'s response to seeing this was: "Well, guess I was wrong about the Fourth of July costume being the gayest outfit ever created."
  
  What is the point here? No, it's not that we think Ramaswamy is gay. He's not, and even if he was, the LGBTQ community would never have him. The point is that every time we conclude that Ramaswamy couldn't possibly get more obnoxious, he somehow does it. His genius for being repulsive equals Liberace's genius for toying with the general public's ideas about sexuality.
  
  How was he obnoxious? Let us count the ways. As we wrote yesterday, he is the conspiracy theorist of the group, and last night he spouted plenty of nonsense on that front, like claiming that Blackrock is the most powerful company in the world and is basically running everything. Ramaswamy also put on his know-it-all hat, in particular making it seem as if it's a BIG DEAL that he can name the provinces of East Ukraine while the other candidates cannot. He engaged in sleazy personal attacks, like calling Haley dumb and making a fat joke at the expense of Chris Christie. He fired off nonsensical, inflammatory rhetoric, like saying the two biggest fascists in the country are Joe Biden and Nikki Haley.
  
  Perhaps the most obnoxious, and certainly the most ham-fisted, moment for Ramaswamy was when he took the notepad provided to the candidates and did this:
  
  
  
  Lord knows what made him think that would be a good idea, but it landed with a thud among those on stage and in the audience. Further, we are much mistaken if it does not launch a thousand memes, along the lines of the Trump Draws Twitter account:
  
  
  
  There are all kinds of things that Ramaswamy memo pad could be made to say, courtesy of Photoshop.
  
  Our presumption, and the presumption of others, has been that Ramaswamy is auditioning for the #2 spot on the Trump ticket. And if so, we don't think he's doing a good job of it. Trump wants someone who is both an attack dog and a lapdog, the way Mike Pence was. But Ramaswamy is too full of himself, and too lacking in control, to be a reliable lapdog, we would say. Trump wouldn't want to risk the possibility that his VP might get out of control. On top of that, Ramaswamy's obnoxious crap isn't being received well by voters. We presume the audience for the debate skewed conservative, since the event was in Alabama, and since it was staged primarily by right-wing organizations. And Ramaswamy was booed, loudly, numerous times. Trump wants someone who's popular with the base, not someone who is a turn-off to many of them.
  
  
• Haley: DeSantis and Ramaswamy have decided, it would appear, that Haley is the enemy. Presumably they reached that conclusion for different reasons (one of them longs to be the clear second-place candidate again, the other wants to kiss up to Donald Trump), but they both got to that same endpoint. So, they both piled on to her, with the primary message being that she's a Joe Biden clone. It takes some pretty tortured logic to pull off that comparison, but there it is.
  
  Haley may have suspected this was coming. Or maybe she has reason to think she needs to shore up her right flank. For whatever reason, she decided to tack pretty hard rightward last night. She reminded everyone that she was a founding member of the tea party movement (which implies that she's Freedom Caucus-friendly). She talked about how conservative her policies on abortion and LGBTQ issues are. She was extremely hawkish on foreign affairs questions.
  
  Since Haley was her usual unflappable self, and since she deftly parried most of the attacks upon her, and since she made clear, once again, that she's the room's strongest person on foreign policy, we have no doubt that most outlets will declare her the winner of the debate, yet again. For our part, however, that's not how we have it. We think that tacking rightward potentially harms her run for the Republican nomination (the RNC, if it ends up choosing a Trump replacement, is going to be concerned about electability) and it certainly harms her if she somehow makes it to the general election. Taking damage, while not gaining anything, does not fit the definition of the word "win."
  
  
• Chris Christie: And that brings us to... the winner, as we see it. Christie is never, ever going to be nominated for president, but he WAS the only candidate on stage last night who did some new and different things, and his performance is the one that might linger in memory, at least for a while.
  
  To start, Christie took on Ramaswamy, and it got bloody. At one point, Ramaswamy tried to talk over Christie and Christie told him to shut up, because "I'm not done yet." Not long thereafter, Christie called Ramaswamy "the most obnoxious blowhard in America." And the former governor even defended Haley against Ramaswamy's incoming fire, remarking: "I've known Nikki for 12 years, longer than he's been voting in Republican primaries." Lots of people have been waiting for someone to take the smarmy one down a peg, and Christie did the best job of it we've seen so far.
  
  Christie was also the only candidate to take on Donald Trump in a meaningful way (with the possible exception of a few cautious criticisms from Haley). Christie expressed his frustrations that nobody in his party is willing to even talk about Trump, comparing the former president to Lord Voldemort (whose name, for those who have not read the Harry Potter books, is feared so much in the wizarding world that few will utter it). Later, Christie shared his view that if Trump becomes president, he will act as a dictator, and will shred the fabric of American democracy.

In the end, this thing is over. And we don't mean that Donald Trump has an insurmountable lead (though that is also true). We mean that the only (slim) hope for any non-Trump candidate is some version of a brokered convention. And there is only one person on stage last night who could possibly be the pick in that circumstance. The RNC and its delegates are not going to go with someone as loathsome as Ramaswamy. They are not going to go with Ron-Bot, who is clearly not ready for the big time, and who presumably never will be. And they are not going to go with Christie, whose approval rating among Republicans is below 20%. That leaves only Haley who has a glimmer of making the strategy of "hold onto second place and hope Trump collapses for some reason" work.

Anyhow, forgive us for turning the snark up to 11. But when you're dealing with people who largely have as much flavor as wallpaper paste, it's about the only way we can think of to make the piece at least somewhat interesting. And, by all reports, there will be at least two more of these before New Hampshire, so get ready to do it all over again. And again. (Z)

Bye, Kev

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) dreamed of being Speaker of the House his whole life, the way some boys dream of being an NFL quarterback or a Major League slugger. Kev got a shot at it, but he had the wrong stuff. Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) made the job look easy because she was probably the best speaker since Joe Cannon. Pros always make it look easy. McCarthy was not a pro. He couldn't manage the Freedom Caucus and they left him out to dry. He could have told the FC: "Either you obey me or I'll work with the Democrats and pass laws you hate with every ounce of your body. For example, we'll legalize all the 'dreamers.' That's popular with our voters. Understand?" He just didn't have it in him, and they dumped him and humiliated him. Poor Kev. Maybe it was the Peter Principle or something, but he had no business being speaker.

Going back to being a backbencher was simply too humiliating, so he announced yesterday that he plans to resign from the House at the end of this year. His district, CA-20, is R+16, so there is no way it will turn blue. However, if McCarthy stays on the job until after Friday at 5 p.m., Gavin Newsom can keep the seat open until the next scheduled election. If McCarthy formally resigns before 5 p.m. on Friday, Newsom will have to call a special election, but will delay it until the last date allowed by California law to keep the GOP caucus a man short as long as he can. In that case, Newsom has 14 days to schedule the special election and it has to be within 4 months. That could put it in late April or even May. Newsom is in no hurry to put another Republican in the House. And the California SoS, Shirley Weber (D), will probably take her good time certifying the election, to make sure she got the count right. It could be mid-May or later before the new member is sworn in.

In his announcement, in the Wall Street Journal, McCarthy said: "I know my work is only getting started." What work? Is he going to run for president? Maybe he can try his hand at being a lobbyist, but that probably won't go well. Lobbyists' clients want to hire people who still have a lot of clout in Congress. That doesn't apply to him. He has an MBA degree from Cal State Bakersfield. Maybe he can find a job being CEO of a medium-sized company. Or maybe he can find some rich Republican to sponsor him so he can travel around the country recruiting non-MAGA candidates for the House.

Meanwhile, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) still has to pass a bunch of budget bills in January, with increasingly small margins. With "George Santos," McCarthy, and Rep. Bill Johnson (R-OH) soon out, the House will be 219R, 213D for a while. That's not a big margin to work with, and the speaker has never tried his hand at cat herding before. We wonder how long Johnson will last.

The House will hold a party for McCarthy, but not everyone is going to attend. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) celebrated the news with a single word on his social media site: "McLeavin'." (V)

Trump Promises to Be a Dictator--for Just One Day

In a town hall in Iowa, Sean Hannity asked Donald Trump: "You are promising America tonight you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?" Trump replied: "Except for Day One." What could he do on Day One? Well, maybe pardon himself and all the people arrested in the Jan. 6 coup attempt, plus everyone in his first administration. Then sign 50 executive orders the Heritage Foundation has prepared for him, many of which would be illegal. How about appointing an acting AG who then ordered Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and a whole bunch of Trump's other opponents arrested? When Hannity asked him to clarify his remark, he said he would shut down the Mexican border and allow oil drilling on federal lands. It could be a busy first day.

Needless to say, the Biden campaign pounced on this. Campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez said: "Donald Trump has been telling us exactly what he will do if he's reelected and tonight he said he will be a dictator on day one. Americans should believe him." Biden himself said: "Trump's not even hiding the ball anymore. He's telling us exactly what he wants to do. He's making no bones about it." Biden is surely going to use "Democracy or Dictatorship? Your call." as a campaign slogan.

Many of Trump's supporters will no doubt say the "dictator" remark was a joke, like killing someone on Fifth Avenue. But some of them may not find it so funny. In states where the difference between the candidates is 1%, losing even 2% of your supporters is a very big deal. (V)

The Nevada Fake Electors Have Been Indicted

On Monday, we noted that Kenneth "The Cheese" Chesebro was going to testify to a Nevada grand jury looking into whether the state's fake electors violated state law. Chesebro's testimony must have been pretty powerful, as yesterday the grand jury indicted all six of them. They are accused of uttering a forged document. This uttering thingie is spreading like the plague. It also got the fake electors in Michigan indicted. Fake electors in Georgia have also been indicted and Arizona AG Kris Mayes is working on those in her state.

Nevada AG Aaron Ford (D) was in a bit of a hurry. The statute of limitations would have run out on Dec. 14. But now that charges have been filed, the fake electors will have to stand trial. One of the utterances made by the fake electors was that they were the duly elected and qualified electors. That is patently false. They were not elected. The slate of electors filed by Joe Biden won Nevada.

On the other hand, the 10 fake electors in Wisconsin avoided a civil suit. They admitted that they were fake electors and promised not to pull the same stunt in 2024. However, a possible criminal case is ongoing. (V)

"This Is Grim"

Horse-race polling a year out should be taken with a few grains of sodium chloride. Nevertheless, according to New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall, multiple factors look discouraging for Joe Biden. Numerous demographic groups that are normally highly Democratic are losing faith in the Democrats. These include young voters, Black voters, and Latino voters. Working-class white voters are largely gone already. The Democrats traditionally were seen as representing the interests of the middle class. That is fraying as well.

Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg ran a detailed poll with 2,500 respondents in swing states and districts. He asked them about 32 subjects. On China, climate change, women's rights, racial inequality, health care, protecting democracy, and not being an autocrat, voters preferred Biden to Trump. On making democracy more secure, it was a tie. On everything else, Trump led. These subjects included being for working people, standing up to elites, feeling safe, keeping wages up to inflation, patriotism, crime, immigration, and protecting the Constitution. We find Trump leading on protecting the Constitution... strange, to put it mildly. But Greenberg is a Democrat and a very experienced pollster. This is not some crazy Rasmussen poll sponsored by Fox News. Greenberg said: "This is grim."

The crosstabs show that the problem is Democrats falling away, not Republicans gaining. We saw the same effect in an item a week ago. The problem is clearly that Democrats are losing faith in the Democratic Party, not that they are suddenly becoming Republicans. Fundamentally, the expectations of many Democrats, especially ones who don't follow politics closely, are simply unrealistic. Democrats didn't have a working majority in the Senate during the first half of Biden's term because Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) opposed the President on so many things. But low-information voters don't want to hear that. What they know is: "He didn't deliver" and they are not interested in excuses.

A Morning Consult poll in September found that "voters are now more likely to see the Republican Party as capable of governing, tackling big issues and keeping the country safe compared with the Democratic Party." By a 9-point margin, voters see the Democrats as more ideologically extreme than the Republicans. Although Morning Consult didn't get into the details, we suspect that many voters believe that the Squad represents the Democratic Party. In public, it is even noisier than the Freedom Caucus, which focuses its ire more on internal House politics than on public opinion.

An NBC poll in September showed that 34% of voters believe the Republicans are better at looking out for the middle class and 36% believe the Democrats are better at it. Historically, the Democrats' lead on this question was as high as 29%. Now it is 2%. The poll was run jointly by Hart Research, a Democratic pollster, and Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican firm.

When Edsall asked Will Marshall, founder and president of the center-left Progressive Policy Institute, the question: "Trump is Kryptonite for American democracy, so why isn't President Biden leading him by 15 points?" Marshall answered that the ascendance of white, college-educated liberals has "pushed Democrats far to the dogmatic left, even as their base grows smaller. Young progressives have identified the party with stances on immigration, crime, gender, climate change and Palestinian resistance that are so far from mainstream sentiment that they can even eclipse MAGA extremism." In other words, the Democrats are focusing on culture-war issues rather than economic issues (e.g., inflation) and taking positions that are anathema to millions of voters.

Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, says that the Democrats are perceived as elitist and weak on issues that were once their foundation. Part of that is the right-wing fixation on the Democrats' "wokeness," but the Democrats do relatively little to refute that. They can't, because that is what young progressives want, but for much of the country, those positions are unacceptable. So if the Democrats go weak on woke, the young progressives won't vote but if they embrace wokeness, middle Americans will go Republican. The Democrats' biggest hope is that Trump will self-immolate, which is a real possibility, but not a strategy. (V)

Jamaal Bowman Gets a Primary Challenger

One left-wing former Black congressman, namely Mondaire Jones, lucked out last week when Liz Whitmer Gereghty decided to drop her challenge. Yesterday, a current left-wing Black congressman, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), got a new challenger. Former Westchester County Executive George Latimer jumped into the primary race against him. He attacked Bowman for spending his time trying to help the Palestinians, rather than the people of Westchester County, which has a substantial Jewish population. Latimer's introductory video contains a clip of Bowman voting against a resolution to condemn Hamas after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel. He also attacked Bowman for voting against Joe Biden's infrastructure bill. Bowman was one of only six Democrats to oppose the bill.

The primary is going to be even worse than the Jones-Gereghty one would have been, because Latimer has been running for public office in Westchester County since 1987 and has never lost a race. Before being a two-term county executive, he served a number of terms in the state Assembly and state Senate. He is well known in NY-16, which covers a smidgen of the Bronx and about half of Westchester. The district is D+20. It is a well-off district, with a median household income of $96,000, well above the national average of $75,000.

Latimer is not Bowman's only problem. Rep. Lisa McCalin (R-MI) has introduced a resolution to censure Bowman for pulling a fire alarm just before a key vote to fund the government in September. It caused chaos as the House evacuated. There was no fire. The Democrats will try to table the motion. If that fails, the vote on the censure motion will get a House vote eventually, though not necessarily this week. (V)

A December to Rhymember, Part V: Ripped from the Headlines

Time for a couple of submissions that connect clearly with today's news. Taking the lead is P.L. from Morelia, Mexico, who tells us "We are briefly vacationing in southern Italy, at the end of a complicated work trip. And I just discovered that the sonnet form originated in Sicily. So here goes a modest attempt at that poetic form":

If Ramaswamy won the next debate,
Or Haley took control of the newsfeed,
Would MAGA voters promptly decry hate,
And race no longer be part of their creed?

DeSantis' freefall: Will it change his tune?
Or might Chris Christie's stand start gaining ground?
Perhaps the better angels will win soon,
And make the rank and file's hearts come round.

Oh no, my friend, change incites not their passion,
And what we sell the faithful are not buying.
Grievance and intransigence remain their fashion;
Racism and culture wars are yet undying.

Blaming the Other is still the easiest way.
Perhaps just one more loss might make them sway.

And one from A.D. in Los Angeles, CA:

"A dictator, moi?" uttered Don
Doubling down on his favorite con
Just 24 hours
Of absolute powers
And poof, just like that I'll be gone.

We'll see what tomorrow brings. If you have submissions, send them here. (Z)

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