“Chris Christie Ordered To The Kiddie Debate Table”: The ‘Happy Hour’ Debate, Where No Successful Candidate Has Gone Before
Chris Christie has officially been banished to where no successful candidate has gone before: the undercard debate.
Fox Business announced Thursday night that the New Jersey governor has been cut from the primetime debate stage due to low poll numbers.
The network, which is co-sponsoring the November 10th debate with the Wall Street Journal, required candidates to average at least 2.5% in the national polls through November 4 in order to qualify for the main stage. Christie is averaging 2% in the polls.
He’s not the only top tier candidate to be knocked down a peg. Mike Huckabee will join him in the so-called “happy hour” debate with nonentities Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal.
Lindsey Graham and George Pataki, who have been stuck at the kiddie table for all of the debates, were removed from the lineup altogether.
It’s possible that being onstage with fewer candidates who are far less popular than he is will provide Christie with an opportunity to stand out. But right now, this looks like a setback for a campaign that was just starting to get some momentum. After Christie gave a strong debate performance last month, his poll numbers in New Hampshire had just started to climb and this week, a video of his remarks on drug addiction and rehabilitation went viral.
Candidates have graduated from the undercard debate to primetime before. After Carly Fiorina introduced herself to the country during the first debate, in Cleveland, she surged in the polls and vaulted into the top tier for the next event. But Christie is the first candidate to be knocked out of the primetime debate. There’s no precedent to help us predict how Christie’s campaign will survive this blow, or if it will even turn out to matter much at all.
Christie was talking about drug addiction in Somersworth, New Hampshire on Thursday night. Just before Fox Business released the news to the public, he was ushered out of the room.
Moments later, his campaign responded on Twitter.
It doesn’t matter the stage, give me a podium and I’ll be there to talk about real issues like this: http://christiene.ws/1Nvu40o #BringItOn
Fox Business’ announcement was a very unwelcome distraction from an otherwise good week for Christie.
After well-received performances during the last two GOP debates, Christie received a bump in the confidence of the pundit class (so much so that the liberal website Salon published an article bemoaning the “Christie comeback” narrative) and in the polls in New Hampshire, where he has focused much of his time during his campaign. In a WBUR poll released Wednesday, 8 percent of likely primary voters said they would support Christie, up from 6 percent in September.
And on Friday, The Huffington Post released a video of Christie talking about addiction. They called it his “emotional plea” and it certainly sounded like one. He talked about the compassion his mother, a smoker who had lung cancer, received when she sought treatment. He encouraged that same compassion for people who suffer from drug addiction.
The video slowly gained steam until it, in the words of a Christie campaign press release, went “viral.” As of Thursday night it has been viewed, on Facebook, over 6 million times.
The Washington Post wrote of the video, “In short, if elections are about moments, Christie is having one.”
But it’s hard to sustain a moment when no one is watching and it’s even harder when appearances suggest that you are no longer a competitive candidate, and that will likely be the case at the 7 p.m. debate Christie will take part in next week.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 5, 2015
“The Irony Of Turkeys Being Excluded”: Here Comes The New (Old) Whine About GOP Debates
Just as the intended lynch mob aimed at Republican debate moderators began to disperse in disarray, we have a new source of candidate complaints and it’s the one that generated the fine old whine we heard earlier in the cycle: the thresholds set for participation in the Main and “undercard” events using national polls. What’s changed are the candidates most affected.
According to CNN Money, two candidates, Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie, have been dropped from the Big Stage for failing to average 2.5% in recent national polls, and two others, Lindsey Graham and George Pataki, won’t even get a seat at the kiddie table because they didn’t reach 1% in any of them.
Huck can make an argument that he’s totally focused on Iowa, though he’s not exactly on fire even there. And Christie has obviously been concentrating his limited resources on NH, where the latest poll (from WBUR) has him in 5th place with 8%. But the New Jersey governor’s bigger complaint might be that his performance in the CNBC debate, and the video of his rap on addiction that has gone near-viral, show a campaign that has risen from the dead even as some (Jeb! Jeb!) have squandered every advantage.
The two “bumped” candidates pretty much just grumbling right now; this is, after all, Fox we are talking about, and there’s only so much smack you can talk about those guys if you are a Republican who wants to get free exposure on Ailes’ various networks.
The real howling is coming from Graham, who’s come up with this novel reason for being kept on stage to croak War! War! War! like some sort of Low Country raven:
“It is ironic that the only veteran in the race is going to be denied a voice the day before Veterans Day,” Graham campaign manager Christian Ferry said.
I guess if the debate was being held a couple of weeks later a few candidates could salute the irony of turkeys being excluded. Maybe I should feed that line to Donald Trump.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, November 7, 2015
“An American Prayer”: Why Doesn’t Lindsey Graham Challenge The ‘Religious Climate’ Deniers In His Party?
Five years ago, the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza had a lengthy and fairly depressing report on the demise of climate-change legislation in the US Senate. Lizza included this interesting tidbit about Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who initially co-sponsored the climate bill with then-Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT):
At a climate-change conference in South Carolina on January 5, 2010, Graham started to sound a little like Al Gore. “I have come to conclude that greenhouse gases and carbon pollution” are “not a good thing,” Graham said. He insisted that nobody could convince him that “all the cars and trucks and plants that have been in existence since the Industrial Revolution, spewing out carbon day in and day out,” could be “a good thing for your children and the future of the planet.” Environmentalists swooned. “Graham was the most inspirational part of that triumvirate throughout the fall and winter,” Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, said. “He was advocating for strong action on climate change from an ethical and a moral perspective.”
But, back in Washington, Graham warned Lieberman and Kerry that they needed to get as far as they could in negotiating the bill “before Fox News got wind of the fact that this was a serious process,” one of the people involved in the negotiations said. “He would say, ‘The second they focus on us, it’s gonna be all cap-and-tax all the time, and it’s gonna become just a disaster for me on the airwaves. We have to move this along as quickly as possible.'”
Graham later washed his hands of the legislation under controversial circumstances, setting the stage for the bill’s death in July 2010. Graham’s abandonment of the legislation—just weeks after he had been touted as the future of climate leadership in the United States–was one of three major setbacks that year for those who longed for a bipartisan solution to the climate crisis, the others being Rep. Bob Inglis’s (R-SC) primary loss to future Benghazi bully Trey Gowdy (R-SC) in June, and Rep. Mike Castle’s (R-DE) loss to Christine O’Donnell in a Republican Senate primary in September.
Five years later, Graham is one of only two Republican presidential candidates (the other being former New York Governor George Pataki) who’s willing to acknowledge the reality of human-caused climate change. The problem is, Graham can’t seem to resist taking nasty potshots at climate-concerned progressives, as he did recently in New Hampshire:
Graham continued by contrasting Democrats who view climate change as a “religion” with Republicans that refuse to accept the mainstream consensus on climate science.
“It is, to me folks, a problem that needs to be solved, not a religion,” Graham said of climate change. “So to my friends on the left who are making this a religion, you’re making a mistake. To my friends on the right who deny the science, tell me why.”
The “religion” rhetoric, apparently borrowed from an ugly 2008 column by Charles Krauthammer, is silly, and Graham would be well-advised to drop it as soon as possible if he’s serious about once again bringing both parties together on this issue. If climate change is, according to Graham, a “religion,” that means Pope Francis is following two “religions.” Does that make any sense at all?
Instead of bashing progressives, why doesn’t Graham challenge the climate deniers in his party to travel down to his home state—recently devastated by fossil-fueled flooding—and tell the relatives and friends of those who died in those floods that human-caused climate-change isn’t real, and that we don’t need to take action? That would be far more productive than taking potshots at climate hawks on the left.
By: D. R. Tucker, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, October 17, 2015
“A Kind Of White-Identity Interest”: The Republican Candidates Chose Nativism Over Christian Rhetoric
Where did God come up in Wednesday night’s GOP debate? In two key places: the discussion of religious liberty (vis-a-vis Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, who recently made headlines by refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples) and a brief consideration of Planned Parenthood, which came under fire earlier this summer thanks to a series of videotapes that purported to show Planned Parenthood officials selling fetal tissue for profit.
What was interesting about the candidates’ treatment of these issues and the others that followed was how limited their discussion of Christianity really was, especially compared to their focus on the transcendent values of America itself, more nativist than Christianist. While Christian reasoning likely underpinned much of the reasoning aired on stage—for instance, the unanimous anti-abortion sentiment and distress over religious liberty when it comes to contraception and gay marriage—direct appeals to Jesus and the Bible were rare and muted. In his statements on Planned Parenthood, Jeb Bush said he believed “life is a gift from God”; the remainder of the candidates explored their plans to defund the organization based not on clearly articulated religious objections to its practices, but rather on its impact on, as Carly Florina put it, “the character of the nation.”
Appeals to the strength and identity of the United States rather than specific religious interests also issued from other candidates. When asked about his position on a flat tax based on Biblical tithing procedures, Carson replied: “It’s all about America.” The Biblical reason he had formerly proposed for flat taxation disappeared.
Mike Huckabee, who flew to Kentucky in the wake of Kim Davis’ jailing to offer her support, made relatively little of his excursion. In fact, during his arguments for strengthened religious liberty protections, Huckabee cited the accommodations made for Muslim prisoners as evidence that Christian workers like Davis deserved the same treatment. When prompted to describe his litmus test for a Supreme Court judge, Huckabee said he would demand an appointee recognize fetal life as human, but then listed a series of amendments he would also require an appointee to value, among them the second and tenth. For a candidate who built his entire career on the Evangelical ascendancy of the 1980s, he said remarkably little about, say, the country’s failure to please God.
Former New York Gov. George Pataki stood out in his argument that Kim Davis and other individuals who refuse to carry out their work on religious grounds should be fired, based on a respect for the rule of law. Pataki, who is a Roman Catholic, received applause from the audience when he said he would have fired Davis for her refusal.
The most rousing rhetoric of the night centered around the character of the United States and the preservation thereof: as in, for example, Pataki’s suggestion that allowing Davis and workers like her to refuse to perform their jobs on religious grounds would be tantamount to an Iranian-style theocracy. Given the debate’s setting, there were numerous invocations of former President Ronald Reagan, who seemed to stand in for an age of American greatness which Donald Trump, among others, seem eager to recover. But the description of the nation as specifically Christian as opposed to just great was notably muted.
Even John Kasich, who, in the run-up to the GOP debates was vocally invested in his Christian faith, seemed to pipe down on the Christian rhetoric. “Jewish and Christian principles force us to live a life bigger than us,” he noted at one point, when explaining a position on foreign military policy.
The majority of the debates were spent discussing immigration, the Iran nuclear deal, and economic policy with regard to flat versus progressive taxation schemes. But the Christian issues of yesteryear—the scourge of pornography, the presence of creationism in schools, the nature of the country as a specifically Christian nation—were ignored. Of the original issues that stirred evangelicals during Reagan’s reign, only abortion remained as a prominent issue, and it has mostly zeroed down to a debate about how to deal with Planned Parenthood in light of a specific scandal. In the place of those specifically Christian concerns is the nativist nationalism Trump introduced into the race early on, which his fellow candidates must now echo to compete with him for the support of their base. Nativism is almost never friendly to Christianity as anything more than a kind of white-identity interest, and even then, the international nature of the religion and its roots in the Middle East tend to put the most ardent white nationalists off. While no GOP candidates currently exhibit that level of nativist sentiment, there certainly appears to be a choice of focuses: either hardcore nativism, or Christianity itself. In this debate at least, it’s clear which decision the candidates made.
By: Elizabeth Bruenig, The New Republic, September 17, 2015
“GOP Junior-Varsity Debate”: Welcome, Losers. I’m Your Moderator, Donald Trump
Welcome to the Fox News junior-varsity debate, featuring these losers to my right and my left. They’re all horrible.
I’m Donald Trump, which you already know. I develop the world’s best buildings, I have $10 billion, and I’ll be your next president, which these dummies don’t seem to understand.
Because I had a hit show, “The Apprentice,” which was huge, just huge, Fox thought this lineup of losers might get some actual ratings if I were to be the moderator. Though even I can’t work miracles at 5 p.m. Seriously, Fox—5 p.m.?
First let’s hear from Rick Perry.
Rick, c’mon, you wear glasses so people think you’re smart. It just doesn’t work—people can see through the glasses. You did a lousy job at the border, so now we have all these Mexican rapists. Anything to say? Not interested.
Next, Carly Fiorina. Once was a CEO, like me. But Carly, look—you got fired from HP. Then you lost in a landslide to Barbara Boxer. I mean, clobbered. If Americans want a CEO to be president, why would they choose a two-time loser instead of Donald Trump?
George Pataki, where are you? Oh, down there. A fellow New Yorker. Hello, George.
Listen, you were a terrible governor of New York, one of the worst. Here’s my question for you: I said you couldn’t be elected dog catcher in New York, so why would you run for president? You’re so far behind in the polls, you’re literally invisible. A nobody. Fox News probably shouldn’t have let you into the lobby. A lobby that could use some work, I might add. It’s horrible. So are you, George.
This says Jim Gilmore. Never heard of him. Who is Jim Gilmore? Is that you? Hello Jim, I’m Donald. You’re horrible.
Bobby Jindal. Interesting life story, very interesting—born in Louisiana just months after your parents emigrated here from India. Real name, Piyush Jindal. First Indian-American governor. Very good. Here’s the question: Can you show me your birth certificate right now?
Let’s turn to Rick Santorum. Rick, hello. Question for you: Do you have a plane yet? I don’t know if you’ve seen, but I have a really, really big plane. Listen, if you ever want to get out of Iowa and see the rest of the country, give me a call and maybe I’ll give you a ride. Maybe.
Finally, my good friend, Lindsey Graham. I see you’re doing great in the polls, really great.
Lindsey, you’ve said that your sister could act as first lady if you become president, since you’re not married, which is something I’ve accomplished three times. Since you made your sister part of the campaign, I’d like to give out her phone number, her e-mail address and her Facebook profile. Fox, can we put up that information? There it is. Make sure to contact Lindsey’s sister today and ask her why her brother is such a loser.
That’s it, time’s up. I’d like to thank Fox News, which is so much better than Univision, it’s not even funny.
Tune in on Jan. 20, 2016, when Sharon Osbourne, Gilbert Gottfried, Gary Busey and other former “Celebrity Apprentice” contestants join me for my presidential inauguration. Rick, make sure to wear your glasses. Other Rick, I’ll try to send a plane for you. And which one is Jim Gilmore, again?
By: Laurence Arnold, John McCorry and Patrick Oster; Opening line Column, Bloomberg Politics, August 6, 2015
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