“The Republican Reality Show Rat Race”: Embracing Magic Hairball Economics And Quack Cures
The current Republican presidential race is less a political contest than a reality TV series: a stage-managed melodrama with a cast of characters selected to titillate and provoke. By that standard, last week’s CNBC debate succeeded far beyond expectations — all but guaranteeing a larger audience for the next exciting installment.
Viewers who tuned in to see Donald Trump boasting and hurling insults at the Sleepwalking Surgeon, the Sweaty Senator, and the Amazing Spineless Governor, found themselves invited to boo an entirely different set of villains — CNBC’s frustrated and argumentative moderators.
In professional wrestling, of course, the referees are always part of the show.
Senator Ted Cruz got the party started with a cleverly contrived bit of bombast camouflaging evasiveness as high principle. Asked if his opposition to the recently negotiated congressional budget compromise showed he wasn’t “the kind of problem solver American voters want,” Cruz attacked moderator John Harwood instead.
“The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media,” Cruz said. “You look at the questions: ‘Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?’ ‘Ben Carson, can you do math?’ ‘John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?’ ‘Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign?’ ‘Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?’ How about talking about the substantive issues the people care about?”
In fact, none of those characterizations was accurate. Nobody called Trump a villain, although Harwood did ask about his “comic book campaign” promises to deport 11 million immigrants, build a giant wall, make Mexico pay for it, and slash taxes by $10 trillion while balancing the budget.
Nobody had to urge Ohio’s governor Kasich to insult Trump and Ben Carson. He’d opened the debate by lamenting that his party’s two leading candidates were people “who cannot do the job.” He’d specifically cited their fantastical budget promises along with Trump’s immigration vows. Elsewhere, Kasich suggested that many Republicans had lost touch with reality.
CSNBC’s Becky Quick never challenged Dr. Carson’s mathematical ability. But she did get visibly frustrated at his serene unwillingness to acknowledge basic arithmetic, and fell into bickering.
No matter. Sen. Cruz, who has carefully avoided antagonizing Trump, had identified the villains. The studio audience of GOP loyalists went ape — hooting, beating their chests, and all but flinging dung at the hapless CNBC moderators. Nothing so animates the GOP base as the perception that they’re being sneered at by effete intellectuals. Pollster Frank Luntz reported thunderous approval among his all-Republican focus group. Poor babies.
I’d argue that something historic is going on. As Kasich suggests, beleaguered Republicans are currently engaged in a retreat from reality as profound as communist apparatchiks during the last days of the USSR. Hence the predominance of hucksters, sharpers and mountebanks among the candidates onstage.
In deference to the astonishing avarice of billionaire donors, instead of Five Year Plans they’re embracing magic hairball economics and quack cures. It’s no accident that the renowned brain surgeon Dr. Ben Carson lent his prestige to Mannatech, an outfit peddling “nutritional supplements” that supposedly cure autism and cancer.
The company recently paid $7 million to settle a deceptive practices lawsuit brought by the Texas Attorney General. Texas! Asked by CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla about this unseemly connection, Carson dismissed it as “propaganda.”
Anybody can watch Carson’s video endorsements online.
Similarly, Mike Huckabee promised to cut health care costs by curing Alzheimer’s, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Of course, the former Arkansas governor has no more chance of becoming president than I do. He’s in it for the book sales, going so far as to hint during the debate that his predecessor Bill Clinton had political opponents murdered.
Hay for the cattle, except that my cows are more skeptical than the average Huckabee reader.
Alas, much of the GOP electorate has reached that sublime point of self-deception where they refuse to acknowledge any reality they don’t wish to believe. In consequence, the saner sorts of conservatives are bailing out. CNBC’s Harwood brought up former Bush-appointed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s statement that “the know-nothingism of the far right” had driven him out of the Republican Party.
That merely showed his “arrogance,” said Sen. Rand Paul of the man who arguably saved the nation’s financial system post-2008.
Bruce Bartlett, the one-time Reagan Treasury official who thinks the GOP has gone badly astray, mocked Cruz’s crybaby rhetoric. “We’ve just seen Hillary Clinton go through 11 hours of questioning, and these guys can’t go a couple minutes of questioning,” he said.
Pressed about his own save-the-billionaires tax scheme, Sen Marco Rubio went off on CNBC’s Harwood.
“Democrats have the ultimate super PAC,” he whined. “It’s called the mainstream media.”
Boo-hoo hoo.
So would you like to hear Anderson Cooper’s first softball question to perennial press favorite Hillary Clinton during the recent CNN Democratic debate?
It was this: “Will you say anything to get elected?”
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, November 4, 2015
“Good Advice For A Presidential Candidate”: Kasich Explains Government Spending To Woman: ‘You Ever Been On A Diet?’
At a town hall Tuesday in Dubuque, Iowa, John Kasich gave an interesting answer to a woman who asked the GOP candidate and former chairman of the House Budget Committee his advice on how to keep federal spending under control.
“I know how to do this. I mean, I know how to balance budgets; I know how to cut taxes; I know how to deal with the bureaucracy. I know how to do these things. And I get there, and we’ll get it done — but it won’t be done overnight,” Kasich said, actually sounding at least somewhat sensible. “It’s gonna take years to get there, because the debt is really high. And there’s no way to just slash all these programs — people wouldn’t accept that. But they will accept change.”
Then his answer got interesting. “And then you get there, and once you’re there, then you say, ‘How are we gonna stay here?’ And that’s where things kind of fall apart, because — Have you ever been on a diet?” Kasich said to the woman.
The woman replied, “Many times.” — to which he laughed and responded, “Well, you’re the perfect example!”
“Okay, so we set a goal, and you reach it. And what happens? How about a little spumoni? How about a trip over to Mario’s, an extra — you ever go to Mario’s? We were there last night. How about a little spumoni? How about another piece of garlic bread?”
The key, he said, was to maintain the original discipline — which might also be a good advice for a presidential candidate making personal remarks to people who ask questions at town halls.
By: Eric Kleefeld, The National Memo, November 4, 2015
“What’s The Price On Jeb Bush’s Integrity?”: Preaching Against The Corrupt Coziness Between Money Interests And Government Officials
If you are a presidential aspirant and you have to tell people that you are a person of integrity — there’s a very good chance that you are not.
And those odds at least quadruple if you have to hire a talking head to attest to your honor; how intriguing, then, that a spokeswoman for the Bush campaign was recently trotted out to tell us that, “Jeb’s record, both in office as Florida’s governor and in the private sector as a successful businessman, is one of integrity.” The testimonial from his paid mouthpiece was necessitated by the still-evolving news story that, after leaving the Florida governorship in 2007, he immediately cashed in on his name, state government knowledge, and contacts. Bush became a richly paid legislative consultant and board member to major corporations that had received lucrative benefits from Florida’s government while he was at the helm of it.
With cynical chutzpah, Jeb, the presidential wannabe, now campaigns as an ethics reformer, piously preaching against the corrupt coziness between money interests and government officials. But in the last eight years, Preacher Bush has pocketed at least $18 million in personal payment from his own quiet spins through the revolving door of government-corporate corruption. For example, Jeb was only out of government office for four months when he got a nice sinecure as a board member of the insurance giant, Tenet Healthcare (which just happened to run several of Florida’s private hospitals under Florida’s Medicare program). In 2006, Tenet was found to have cheated patients and taxpayers with more than a billion dollars in overcharges. To settle this malfeasance, the corporation paid only $7 million.
Meanwhile, Tenet has gushed in recent financial reports that it has “benefited greatly from Mr. Bush’s extensive background in government service, his perspectives on public policy and social issues.” In heartfelt gratitude, during the past eight years, this one corporation alone has put more than $2 million in Bush’s pocket.
The Tenet case clearly shows that Bush suffers from a total lack of integrity, but poor ‘ol Jeb seems to also have a terminal case of “Mitt Romney disease” — he just keeps blurting out asinine comments that reveal the fact that, in heart, soul, and political mindset, he is yet another “son of a Bush.”
His inner-bigotry against the poor, coupled with his cartoonish concept of the black community’s political motivation, was outed recently when he was asked how he planned to win the votes of African-Americans. “Our message is one of hope and aspiration,” he responded. Okay, Jeb, go positive, so far so good! But then the deep prejudice derived from his narrow upbringing as a child of privilege surfaced. His campaign message “isn’t one of division and get in line and we’ll take care of you with free stuff,” he asserted with a sneer. Then, to punctuate his little lecture on how to appeal to low-income black families, the multimillionaire heir to the Bush fortune said he would tell them: “You can achieve earned success.”
Yes, Jeb — instead of hard-hit people lining up to get what you call “free stuff” (like unemployment compensation and health care), thinks it better to challenge them to “earn” success. Tell them to have the same gumption you did — to be born to rich parents, to be welcomed as “legacy” applicants into the most prestigious schools, and to have their fathers open the doors for them to “achieve” financial and political success.
Yet the former “shoo-in” for the GOP presidential nomination can’t figure out why he’s running fifth in New Hampshire and fifth in Iowa, even after pouring millions into a month-long blitz of TV ads to goose up his appeal. Such shallowness, callousness, and condescension expose an ingrained contempt for all who don’t live in Bush’s elite zip code. No one but his fellow “one-percenters” wants someone like that in the White House.
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, November 4, 2015
“The Real GOP Divide”: One Of The Big Contrasts Between The Two Parties; Democrats Are More Bullish On The Future
Maybe our definition of the Republican presidential contest is a little off.
It’s often cast, accurately enough, as a choice between “outsiders” and “insiders.” But another party division may be more profound — between Republicans who still view the country’s future hopefully and those deeply gloomy about its prospects.
The pessimism within significant sectors of the GOP is more than the unhappiness partisans typically feel when the other side is in power. It’s rooted in a belief that things have fundamentally changed in America, and there is an ominous possibility they just can’t be put right again.
This is one of the big contrasts between the two parties: Democrats are more bullish on the future.
Hillary Clinton has a big lead in the national polls because Democrats broadly favor continuity, with some tweaks. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) offers a tough critique of inequality and the outsized power of the rich. But he and his supporters are comfortable with the country’s cultural direction and have enough faith in government to believe it can engineer the reforms that economic fairness requires.
These thoughts are provoked by an evening spent watching last week’s GOP presidential debate with a group of Republicans pulled together here for me by Sarah Stewart, a New Hampshire political consultant.
They were anything but pitchfork-bearing rebels, and many of them are involved with local government. There was not a Donald Trump or Ben Carson supporter in the lot, although Jon DiPietro, a libertarian-leaning businessman, said he gets Trump’s appeal and could imagine voting for him.
The debate watchers shared the media’s view in one respect: They all agreed that Jeb Bush had a bad night. DiPietro’s offhandedly devastating comment: “Bush had a typical poor performance.” Toni Pappas, a Hillsborough County commissioner, offered sympathy that was almost as crushing. “I feel badly for Jeb,” she said. “He’s really a bright guy.”
The consensus was that the strongest performance came from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, not Marco Rubio, the man lifted high by the very media he and the others enjoyed attacking during the event. Rubio gained ground with some in the group, but Newton Kershaw III, a successful developer, said the young Florida senator still hadn’t persuaded him that he had the experience to be president. Rubio, Kershaw said, looked “rehearsed and studied.”
Gary Lambert, a former state senator who chairs Lindsey Graham’s campaign here, was proud of the South Carolina senator’s performance in the undercard match. But he spoke for the group in praising Christie for having some of the evening’s best moments. Lambert also offered his take on Carson’s appeal: “He remains so calm. I could never do that.” Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) also got some nods of approval.
But the most instructive part of the evening came toward the end when Ross Terrio, a Manchester school board member, took the conversation to a different place, describing his response to President Obama’s time in office. “I have gotten so pessimistic,” he said. “I used to be such an optimistic person. Maybe Obama just sucked the life out of me.” Terrio, who works as a pharmacist, has no complaints about his personal situation but wonders how his neighbors with much more constrained incomes can make it.
DiPietro shared Terrio’s worries that the country’s problems might be beyond our ability to solve, especially if Democrats win the White House again. Terrio, for his part, wrote me later to say that he was pessimistic about the future “regardless of which party wins the presidency.” Reflecting his skepticism about the public sector, DiPietro said he had warned his daughters about a dark future in which “government’s going to be reaching into your wealth.” Lambert’s worries focused more on terrorism and the rise of the Islamic State, one reason he supports Graham’s robust interventionism.
Others in the group pronounced themselves more hopeful, Pappas, perhaps, most of all. She highlighted her faith that the inventiveness and entrepreneurial spirit of the next generation would pull the country through.
But that this argument about the country’s long-term viability could break out among these thoughtful citizens — they in no way fit the stereotypes we liberals sometimes hang on conservatives — speaks to a central reality of our politics: Many Republicans see government itself as almost irreparably broken.
This is why there’s cheering on the right for the obstructionism of groups such as the House Freedom Caucus. Throwing sand in the gears of the machine is an honorable pursuit if you believe the machine is headed entirely in the wrong direction. It’s also why Trump and Carson will not be easily pushed aside.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 1, 2015
“The GOP’s Deranged List Of Debate Demands”: Somebody Save Us From Reporters Asking Rude Questions
The Republican debates have been a disaster for some candidates, a boon for others and an uninspiring spectacle for the nation to witness. But don’t blame it all on the moderators.
Not that the questioners are blameless, mind you. It’s true that some of the queries at last week’s CNBC encounter seemed designed to provoke rather than elucidate. Ted Cruz’s memorable characterization of the questions sounded like a parody: “ ‘Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?’ ‘Ben Carson, can you do math?’ ‘John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?’ ‘Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign?’ ‘Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?’ ” But the moderators, using different words, really did ask those things.
They weren’t crazy questions, though, even if they should have been framed in a less confrontational way.
Trump was asked about the central argument of his candidacy, which is that his brains, energy and competence would allow him to accomplish improbable feats such as building a wall along the southern border and making Mexico pay for it, deporting 11 million illegal immigrants and cutting taxes without increasing the deficit. “Is this a comic-book version of a presidential campaign?” was not the best way to phrase it, but the question was certainly germane.
Carson was asked about math because his proposal for a flat income tax of about 15 percent doesn’t come close to adding up. Kasich was asked his opinion of front-runners Trump and Carson because he had begun the evening with an unprompted attack on the two outsiders as unqualified to be president.
Rubio was asked to respond to an editorial in Florida’s Sun Sentinel newspaper that cited his absenteeism from Senate floor votes and called on him to resign his seat. The paper’s stance was “evidence of the bias that exists in the American media today,” he said, omitting the fact that the Sun Sentinel endorsed him in his 2010 Senate race.
And as for Bush’s anemic poll numbers, the fact is that he was once considered a strong favorite to win the nomination. The plan was for a “shock and awe” campaign that would overwhelm the field. So far, it has fizzled.
An argument could be made that such horse-race questions are a waste of valuable airtime. But the other lines of inquiry that Cruz blasted in his soliloquy were substantive and legitimate — and apparently made the candidates uncomfortable. Time to put an end to that.
Representatives from all the leading campaigns except one — that of businesswoman Carly Fiorina — met at an Alexandria hotel Sunday night to try to wrest control of future debates from the television networks and the Republican National Committee. The meeting was the brainchild of neurosurgeon Carson, who is running a strong second to Trump in national polls and leading him in first-in-the-nation Iowa. After Trump’s campaign joined in calling for the summit, the others had no choice but to come along.
Carson’s original idea was apparently to have all candidates onstage, including those relegated to the undercard, and for each to give a five-minute opening statement. This would take well over an hour and turn a “debate” into a string of little stump speeches. The fact that television executives would never agree to such terms did not bother Carson’s advisers, who have suggested that the debates be streamed on the Internet instead.
Republican attorney and power broker Ben Ginsberg — who no longer has a horse in this race, following Scott Walker’s withdrawal — chaired the meeting. Ginsberg suggested the hosts be required to make a long list of promises, including not to “ask the candidates to raise their hands to answer a question” or “have reaction shots of members of the audience or moderators during debates.”
The RNC decided last week to “suspend” a planned February debate to be hosted by NBC News — CNBC’s parent network — and Telemundo. Bush’s representative reportedly argued that the party should not turn its back on the only Spanish-language network scheduled to participate in a debate. According to Post reporter David Weigel, quoting an attendee, Trump’s campaign manager shot back that if Telemundo were included, “Trump walks.” Sources later told The Post that Trump had decided to negotiate with the networks on his own.
In past cycles, the RNC was the final arbiter. But the party is in chaos and the candidates, led by Trump and Carson, are driving the bus. We’ll face down Vladimir Putin and the leaders of Iran, the contenders all say, but somebody save us from reporters asking rude questions.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 2, 2015
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