“Trouble In The Ranks”: GOP Debate Revolt Falls Apart
John Kasich, Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie have all refused to sign the GOP letter proposing debate changes, their campaigns said Monday night.
“We are declining to sign the letter,” Kasich spokesman Chris Schrimpf told The Daily Beast. “We’re happy the group decided to agree with us to not alter the Fox debate. As the governor of Ohio he is used to answering tough questions all the time.”
Schrimpf clarified that by “group,” he meant all the representatives for the campaigns in attendance at the meeting. He did not respond when asked who all was in attendance.
When reached for comment, Christie’s communications director Samantha Smith pointed The Daily Beast to comments Christie made on Fox & Friends this morning. “Stop complaining,” Christie said. “Do me a favor, set up a stage, put podiums up there, and let’s just go. Okay?”
Carly Fiorina didn’t even attend the meeting on Sunday night. Deputy Communications Director Sarah Isgur Flores shared an email with the Daily Beast that she sent to Ben Ginsberg, the lawyer running the closed door session. Flores claims that they skipped the meeting and opted for dinner at Applebee’s instead.
“Our campaign choose not to attend your closed door meeting last night,” Flores wrote. “We had dinner at the Applebee’s in Pella, Iowa instead.
“These debates are an important chance for voters to see conservative candidates under pressure and over time. We have consistently and successfully discussed our concerns with the networks and the voters–and not behind closed doors like the political class seems to like to do. We encourage each of the campaigns addressed here to do the same.
“As we have expressed publicly, we encourage the RNC to sanction conservative networks such as the Blaze and One America News to host and moderate a debate. We do not care whether it’s 67 degrees or our green room isn’t as plush as another candidate.
“Team Carly will not be signing this letter.”
The letter features stipulations for future debates, including guaranteed opening and closing statements of at least 30 seconds for each candidate. It threatens that candidates will back out of debates if the demands are not met. Donald Trump similarly rejected the letter earlier today, reportedly opting to negotiate directly with the television networks in question.
Ben Carson’s campaign, which was the principal architect of the meeting, has not responded to a request for comment from The Daily Beast.
By: Gideon Resnick, The Daily Beast, November 2, 2015
“The Festival Of Populist Passion”: Republicans Displayed Their Passion For The Little Guy At Wednesday’s Debate. It Was A Total Scam
If you knew absolutely nothing about American politics and tuned into the Republican presidential debate Wednesday night, you would have come away convinced that the GOP is the party of the little guy, the party that wants to advocate for low-wage workers, middle-class families, and those who are struggling. And the wealthy? Screw those guys — Republicans can’t stand them. If somebody told you that this party’s last presidential nominee got in a heap of trouble for contemptuously saying that 47 percent of Americans are lazy leeches who just want to live off government handouts while the morally upstanding wealthy do all the work, you’d respond, “Surely you must be mistaken.”
In case you didn’t tune in to this festival of populist passion, here are a few of the highlights:
Like many of the candidates, Ted Cruz has a flat tax plan, which because it eliminates tax progressivity would entail huge tax cuts for the wealthy. He described it by saying, “The billionaire and the working man, no hedge fund manager pays less than his secretary.”
In the course of arguing (from what I could tell) that all taxation is theft, Mike Huckabee said, “This is for the guy, you know, who owns a landscaping business out there. If somebody’s already stolen money from you, are you going to give them more?”
Carly Fiorina, a former corporate CEO whose biggest accomplishment was the disastrous merger between HP and Compaq, and who is worth tens of millions of dollars, railed against corporate mergers and the wealthy. “Big and powerful use big and powerful government to their advantage,” she said. “It’s why you see Walgreens buying Rite Aid. It’s why you see the pharmaceuticals getting together. It’s you see the health insurance companies getting together. It’s why you see the banks consolidating. And meanwhile, small businesses are getting crushed….Big government favors the big, the powerful, the wealthy, and the well-connected, and crushes the small and the powerless.”
Marco Rubio related, for the eight zillionth time, the fact that his father was a bartender and his mother was a maid. John Kasich showed why he isn’t in the top tier of candidates by failing to bring up the fact that his dad was a mailman.
Ted Cruz said, “The truth of the matter is, big government benefits the wealthy, it benefits the lobbyists, it benefits the giant corporations. And the people who are getting hammered are small businesses, it’s single moms, it’s Hispanics. That is who I’m fighting for.”
“Wall Street is doing great,” Cruz said later, and “today the top 1 percent earn a higher share of our income than any year since 1928,” while the Federal Reserve has apparently caused the price of hamburgers to skyrocket.
Rand Paul agreed that the Fed “causes income inequality.”
Ben Carson said that when it comes to regulations, “The reason that I hate them so much is because every single regulation costs in terms of goods and services. That cost gets passed on to the people. Now, who are the people who are hurt by that? It’s poor people and middle class. Doesn’t hurt rich people if their bar of soap goes up ten cents, but it hurts the poor and the middle class.”
“The simple fact is that my plan actually gives the middle class the greatest break,” said Jeb Bush.
As it happens, the truth is that Bush’s tax plan showers its biggest benefits on the wealthy, not the middle class, both in percentage terms and in absolute terms. And this is true of all the tax plans that have been released by the Republican candidates so far. They all either use a flat tax, which by definition cuts the taxes of the wealthy, or they reduce income taxes for the wealthy and eliminate other taxes the wealthy pay; for instance, Marco Rubio would completely eliminate both capital gains taxes and inheritance taxes. As Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “among the proposals with real detail, there’s a rough consensus, and it comes down to this: lower taxes for everybody, but especially for the wealthy.”
Republicans would have a couple of responses to this objection. The first is that if you’re going to cut everyone’s taxes, of course the wealthy will benefit more, because they pay at higher rates and their incomes are higher. As Rubio himself said during the debate, “5 percent of a million is a lot more than 5 percent of a thousand. So yeah, someone who makes more money, numerically, it’s going to be higher.” But there’s no requirement that if you’re going to cut taxes you have to give everyone the same percentage reduction.
The second response Republicans have is that their tax plans, combined with eliminating regulations, will super-charge the economy to such a degree that people in the poor and middle class will benefit tremendously. There’s a name for that idea: trickle-down economics.
And it isn’t like we’ve never tried this before. You may remember a guy named George W. Bush, who was president not that long ago. He instituted a program pretty much exactly like what today’s Republican candidates propose: large tax cuts targeted mostly at the wealthy combined with slashing regulations. And what happened? Anemic growth, culminating in the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. If Republicans are right, how could such a thing have happened?
If you ask them, they’ll reply that Bush wasn’t true to conservative economic orthodoxy because he didn’t cut the size of government. But if that’s your explanation for why his economic record was so poor, then you’re saying that neither cutting taxes nor cutting regulations would make much of a difference; all that matters is the size of government.
But then how could they explain the Clinton years, when the economy added 22 million jobs despite the fact that taxes went up, regulations increased, and government grew? It’s a real head-scratcher.
Let me suggest something shocking: The Republican presidential candidates do not actually want to cut regulations, slash safety net programs (which didn’t come up in the debate), and eliminate regulations on corporations because of their deep and abiding concern for the poor and middle class.
Some things don’t change in American politics, one of which is that conservatives believe that making life easier for the wealthy and corporations is not just a good idea in practical terms but also a moral imperative. It’s the latter that makes the former less important. Even when those policies fail to deliver us all to the economic Shangri-La conservatives promise, they do not lose faith in the policies’ righteousness.
But other things do change. Right now we’re in a time of economic anxiety, when inequality and stagnant wages have made trickle-down economics particularly unappealing. So if you aren’t going to offer something different than what you have before, the next best thing is to clothe it in populist rhetoric. It remains to be seen whether anyone will buy it.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Cintributor, The Week, October 29, 2015
“Donald The Sensible”: There’s No Centrist Superman To Save You
You’re all well familiar with Kubler-Ross’s famous five stages of death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Here are Tomasky’s five stages of watching a Republican debate: mockery, rage, double rage, boredom, despair.
I start, as I’d reckon most liberals do, with mockery, which was easy Wednesday night when most of them said in essence that their greatest flaw was that they cared too much (in fairness, Hillary Clinton had earlier said something similar). Then one of them says something unforgivably idiotic—and yes, there’s such a thing as forgivable idiocy—like Carly Fiorina pretending that the characters “401k” were handed down to the human race from God on Sinai and not created by the very federal government she was in that selfsame sentence traducing, and it’s rage time. And so on and so on.
But I end with despair, because the previous two (if we’re lucky) hours have revealed to me that these candidates and the citizens cheering them on just live in a totally different universe than the one I and most of my friends inhabit, and while there can be an occasional meeting of the minds on certain small matters, the sad fact is that we are going to be stuck with the current polarization for a long time yet. I think at least eight more years.
People in my position aren’t supposed to say things like this. We’re supposed to keep telling your sort that bipartisanship is in sight, shimmering in the gloaming just beyond the poppy fields. Now it’s true that Congress did just pass that budget on a bipartisan basis, but that of course is an aberration. And you know it and I know it, and everyone who writes sentences like “Perhaps this will usher in a new era of blahblahblah” knows it too.
I was reading David Brooks the other day, his column fantasizing about “a sensible Trump.” This hybrid ubermensch with “impeccable outsider status but also a steady temperament, deep knowledge, and good sense” would, in Brooks’s telling, bring together the leaders of both parties. He would sit them down and explain to them that we need to help people in the lower half of the income distribution, and that the answer is sitting right there in some research by a Harvard team led by the economist Raj Chetty.
Following the Harvard team’s example means doing some things Republicans like and some things Democrats like, so both sides get a little something but give up something too; but if we can do this, argues Donald the Reasonable, we will have started to solve our two greatest problems, stagnant wages and partisan dysfunction.
I happen to be familiar with the research of which Brooks speaks, and I’d be delighted for Raj Chetty’s work to serve as model for federal government action. But there is, unfortunately, no reason to think in real life that anything like this could happen.
Why? Because before he got elected, Donald the Reasonable would have to take a position on abortion. He would undoubtedly try to find some kind of nuanced lane, to use the au courant word, somewhere in between the standard Democratic and Republican positions. But this of course would just dissatisfy both parties. And as the Republicans appear to be moving toward a position that doesn’t even acknowledge the traditional three exceptions, any deviation from that by D the R will brand him just another baby killer.
He will have to take lots of positions, this fellow. On same-sex marriage. On whether insurers should be compelled to cover contraceptive services. On immigration and citizenship. On who his model Supreme Court justices are. On free trade. On a minimum wage. On how much he’s willing to mix it up with Putin. On whether Hollywood and the universities are ruining America. On climate change. He can’t run for president saying, “Well, sure, all those things are important, but what I’m really all about here is implementing the ideas of Raj Chetty.”
In other words, partisan choices are utterly inescapable. I don’t celebrate this, but I don’t necessarily lament it either, the way a lot of centrist pundits do. These are important things. They’re all worth fighting over, and for. There are plenty of compromises that Democrats and liberals should, and I’m pretty sure would, be willing to make in the climate-change fight, for example. A carbon tax vs. credits, how much fracking and drilling, the mix of renewables, the amount we should contribute to the UN fund—all these and more can be debated by two parties that have different views on the urgency of the problem and the proper role of government in addressing it. But when one party just denies the consensus of 97 percent of the scientific community, you can’t compromise with it. You just have to defeat it.
The hope, if there is one, is this. Hillary Clinton wins. That constitutes the GOP’s third loss in a row (and, in popular-vote terms, sixth out of the last seven). Maybe then the GOP takes a look in the mirror and at the data, which will show them if they study it honestly that they lost, again, because they failed to carry purple states that as a party they’d simply become too conservative to win.
The Ted Cruz “we weren’t conservative enough!” wing will still argue its position. And of course the Republican-led House (or House and Senate, the GOP retains control) will start out by blocking President Clinton in every way it can. But she’d probably win re-election in 2020, simply because most incumbents do, and then the Republicans would be looking at 16 straight years of being locked out of the White House, and the country will be that much more Latino, and Clinton will take Georgia and come close in Texas, and finally they’ll run up the flag. So in 2024, we might have a choice between a liberal-moderate Democrat and a conservative-moderate Republican, which the Republican would probably win, and the party’s conservative wing would be somewhat tamed.
That’s the only hope for the country, really. There are extremists. They need to be defeated enough times so that their less extreme comrades can outmuscle them and guide their party back to a place where we’re all at least agreeing on basic evidentiary propositions. There is no Donald the Sensible who can save us.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 30, 2015
“Bald-Faced And Blatant Lies”: Debate Fallout; Even Conservatives Are Appalled By Republican Mendacity
For people who so often accuse Hillary Clinton of lying, the Republican presidential candidates seem to feel perfectly free to bend, twist, and shred the truth at will. Unsurprisingly, that is just what several of them were caught doing in their free-for-all CNBC debate. They prevaricated about themselves, their policies, and their opponents, without blinking an eye – and for the most part, they got away with it.
Do nice people tell self-serving lies? Perhaps they do, because it was terribly nice Ben Carson who uttered one of the most blatant whoppers of the evening.
To loud booing from the partisan audience, moderator Carl Quintanilla asked the soft-spoken neurosurgeon about his long and lucrative involvement with Mannatech, a nutritional supplement manufacturer that has been cited for false health claims for its “glyconutrients.” (How bad was Mannatech? Bad enough to provoke a fraud action brought by Greg Abbott, the former Texas attorney general who is now that state’s very conservative governor.)
“I didn’t have an involvement with [Mannatech],” retorted Carson. “That is total propaganda, and this is what happens in our society. Total propaganda.”
What Carson’s noisy fans probably didn’t know is that this was no “liberal media” setup. The doctor’s decade-long relationship with Mannatech – which turns out to have included a written contract, paid speeches, and a video endorsement on the company’s website – was exposed last year by Jim Geraghty of National Review, the flagship publication of American conservatism. Following the debate, Geraghty slammed Carson for “bald-faced lies” and “blatantly lying” about his relationship with the supplement firm.
Equally mendacious about his own personal history was Marco Rubio, who “won” the debate according to many observers. When Becky Quick of CNBC asked a predictable question about his checked financial affairs, which have included foreclosures, liquidations, phony expense accounts, and other embarrassments, the senator from Florida shot back: “You just listed a litany of discredited attacks from Democrats and my political opponents, and I’m not gonna waste 60 seconds detailing them all.”
Discredited attacks? Actually, Quick’s question was premised on facts that are not in dispute – as even Rubio himself acknowledged in his own campaign book. So frontally deceptive was his response that an outraged Joe Scarborough, his fellow Florida Republican, called him out on MSNBC’s Morning Joe the next day.
“Marco just flat-out lied to the American people there,” Scarborough complained. “And I was stunned that the moderators didn’t stop there and go, ‘Wait a second, these are court records. What are you talking about?…Becky was telling the truth, Marco was lying. And yet everybody’s going, ‘Oh, Marco was great.’ No, Marco lied about his financials.” Not incidentally, Rubio also lied about the effects of his tax plan, claiming his tax cuts would mostly benefit lower-income families when in fact its biggest benefits would accrue to the top one percent, as Republican tax schemes almost always do.
Another brand of lie was pronounced by Carly Fiorina, who drew attention at the last GOP by insisting she had watched a grisly Planned Parenthood video that doesn’t exist. This time, she reached back to the 2012 Republican campaign to invent a factoid about women’s employment.
Fiorina tries to sell herself as the candidate tough enough to take down Clinton, and tries to prove it by making stuff up. At this debate, she huffed:
It is the height of hypocrisy for Mrs. Clinton to talk about being the first woman president, when every single policy she espouses and every single policy of President Obama has been demonstratively bad for women. Ninety-two percent of the jobs lost during Barack Obama’s first term belonged to women.
But as PolitiFact quickly established, that statement was false in every particular. Not only did women not lose “92 percent” of the jobs in Obama’s first term, the number of women employed during the period from January 2009 to January 2013 grew by 416,000. Naturally, as she did with Planned Parenthood, Fiorina angrily repeated the lie when challenged.
Fiorina isn’t the only Republican who doesn’t like being exposed. Rubio ridiculously claimed that the “mainstream media” is really a Democratic SuperPAC. And now RNC chair Reince Priebus has reneged on the party’s debate agreement with NBC News. He and his candidates just couldn’t handle two hours of sharp but thoroughly polite questioning.
They constantly insult Clinton, but how would any of these slippery blowhards survive something like the 11-hour Benghazi grilling she breezed through on Capitol Hill? If you want to understand who they are, just listen to them whine.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, Featured Post, The National Memo, October 30, 2015
“Settling The Issues Of Honor At 40 Paces”: Forget Debates; The Republicans Should Have A Duel
The possibility of fisticuffs breaking out at Wednesday’s GOP debate is not an entirely fanciful one. (Indeed, it could be the solution for Jeb Bush’s flailing campaign.) The Republican presidential campaign has focused all along on matters of honor more than matters of policy. Sure, all the major candidates are offering right-wing fantasies of one sort or another, ranging from Jeb Bush’s promise of 4 percent growth to Donald Trump’s huge border wall to be paid for by the Mexican government. But thanks to Trump, even farcical policy proposals have taken a backseat to a much more personal contest to prove who is the toughest hombre in town.
The Republicans desperately need a way to resolve these disputes so they can talk about something else. I’m here to make a suggestion: Why not resolve the personalized differences by fighting old-style duels? Otherwise, as long as Trump’s in the race, the insults will continue to fly—and threaten to suck up all the oxygen in the debates.
Trump is a master of the schoolyard taunt, and many of his jibes carry with them the suggestion that his opponents are less than virile. Trump’s jeers that Jeb Bush and Ben Carson are “low-energy” and “super low-energy,” respectively, have certainly carried that connotation. While Trump’s male rivals have been stung by these rebukes, the only time the real-estate magnate has been dented is when he’s challenged women—most notably Megyn Kelly and Carly Fiorina—with a different set of insults, focused on menstruation and personal appearances. Those attacks backfired, suggesting that that the front-runner is at a loss when an argument isn’t about comparative manliness.
Trump’s male competitors have tried to answer in kind, with little luck. Before he dropped out, Rick Perry challenged Trump to a gym contest: “Let’s get a pull-up bar out here and see who can do more pull-ups,” said the former Texas governor. On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Carson implicitly responded by calling attention to how tough he was before he became a surgeon and politician. “As a teenager, I would go after people with rocks, and bricks, and baseball bats, and hammers,” Carson told Chuck Todd. “And, of course, many people know the story when I was 14 and I tried to stab someone.” (If you don’t know the story, read here.)
But pull-up bars and tales of youthful brawls won’t hack it. The Republican candidates need a more formal way of settling the issues of honor that Trump has placed at the center of GOP politics. They should look back at the history of Europe and the United States. Traditionally, matters of honor have been settled not by discussion but by a contest of arms. When someone insults your family, as Trump has with his snide comments about Jeb Bush’s brother and wife, the normal response isn’t to continue politely debating, but rather to ask the creep making the remarks if he wants to step outside.
Duels are the ideal solution. It’s true that duelling fell out of fashion after the end of the Civil War, because the slave South was the last place in the United States where the institution was valued. Still, duelling has a venerable place in American political history. Most famously, Alexander Hamilton was killed by Vice-President Aaron Burr in a duel. Andrew Jackson loved challenging men to duels, and survived at least 13 of them. When a famous marksman named Charles Dickinson insulted Jackson’s wife in 1806, for instance, the future president had no choice but to challenge him to a duel. The battle left a bullet permanent lodged in Jackson’s chest, causing persistent pain for the rest of his life, but he was still glad for the outcome. “If he had shot me through the brain, sir, I should still have killed him,” Jackson averred. If Bush had responded to Trump’s gibe about having Mexican wife in the same manner, we’d already have a very different nomination race for 2016.
As Globe and Mail editor Gerald Owen noted in an informative 1989 essay for The Idler magazine, duels were not mindless displays of violence but helped regulate disagreement. “The duel is not, as its enemies have often said, a mediaeval remnant, but a fashion from the Italian Renaissance, and no older than the protests against it,” Owen noted. “It is not to be confused with several related institutions. It is not the same as single combat in the course of war, for it is concerned with personal honour. It is not a sport like jousting; only in the Southern United States were spectators permitted. It is not a feud or vendetta; it is between individuals, not families; instead of festering, it settles disputes finally, giving rise to what lawyers call res judicator. It is not a spontaneous brawl, as in a bar or hockey game, for it has its rituals and conventions.”
As Owen’s remarks suggest, the duel has much to recommend it for precisely the type of disputes that are tearing up the Republican Party. As the main candidates are divided primarily along issues of honor, the ritualistic combat to decide who is the better man (or in Fiorina’s case, the better woman) is the best way to go. And surely a party as firmly committed to NRA dogma would have no objections.
A modest proposal, then, for the remaining GOP debates: Make them open-carry. And if (or when) Trump insults Jeb or any of the others, settle the dispute at once at 40 paces. The two combatants would of course have to agree on weapons and seconds, but this could be arranged through the same negotiations that go into making up the rules for the debates. (As a bonus, this would also provide a test for Trump’s self-proclaimed mastery of the art of the deal.) Depending on how good a shot he proves to be, this might be the only way that Trump can be defeated on his own terms, allowing the reminder of the debates to edge into actual policy arenas.
By: Jeet Heer, Senior Editor at the New Republic, October 26, 2015
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