State of the Race: And Then There Were Five

What was once described as the “deepest” bench of Republican candidates for President has been winnowed down to two political neophytes, two first-term U.S. Senators, and a two-term governor with almost no chance of winning. 

Eight months ago Donald Trump entered the race for President as a laughingstock and is now the odds-on favorite to win the nomination. In just the past week, he insulted the most recent Republican ex-President in front of more than 10 million debate viewers using talking points that sounded like they came from Moveon.org or Code Pink, got skewered by the Pope, and dismissed out of hand any changes to Social Security or Medicare. The end result? He won the South Carolina primary going away. The breadth and depth of Trump’s win was across the board - he won moderates and fought Ted Cruz to a tie among evangelicals. He also won the military vote even as he had questioned whether the Bush Administration had lied about WMD in Iraq.

Meanwhile, his closest two competitors are the most hated man in the Senate (Ted Cruz) and one of his colleagues (Marco Rubio) who has a penchant for giving victory speeches when he loses and had arguably the single worst debate meltdown since Lloyd Bentsen told Dan Quayle he was no Jack Kennedy. Lagging behind those two men are Ben Carson, whose entire campaign appears to have been an elaborate direct order mail fundraising scheme that collected money to pay for more direct mail fundraising (there is a less polite name for it, but I won’t go there), and John Kasich, the two-term Ohio Governor and former U.S. Congressman who had a brief moment in the New Hampshire sun (2nd place) that now seems like a hundred years ago. 

Where do we go from here? The Nevada caucuses are in two days and then seven days after that the so-called “SEC Primary” will hand out nearly a quarter of all primary delegates. Polling has been spotty in most places, but most show Trump ahead, with a few exceptions (Texas, where Cruz is narrowly winning and Minnesota, the one state Rubio may actually be able to win). Jeb Bush’s scant support can now be distributed, though polling suggests the impact will be negligible other than in the race for donor dollars (which have not moved the needle against Trump). 

In fact, while the conventional wisdom is that most deep-pocketed donors will move from Bush to Rubio based on amorphous “electability,” I would not be surprised if Kasich gets a second look, especially if Bush endorses him. While Rubio projects youth and vigor, he has also shown that when pressed, he will fold, not a comforting thought if Trump trains his rhetorical sights on the Florida Senator. Chris Christie’s exposure of Rubio’s soft underbelly would trouble me if I were a Republican bigwig, whereas Kasich’s blue collar roots, lengthy resume and residency in the Ohio Governor’s mansion would seem like the safer bet. Cruz is radioactive to D.C. Republicans and has not shown he can expand his base beyond very conservative and/or highly religious voters. 

Ultimately, it may not matter. Trump has a solid core of support that cannot be moved and the idea that as more people drop out their supporters will coalesce around a single alternative like Rubio is dubious. The key for Trump is whether he can continue “telling it like it is” while refining his message enough to give comfort that if he wins the nomination he will not blow up the country. The reality is that if anyone besides Trump had performed so strongly in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and likely Nevada, no one would question whether that person would win the nomination; but because Trump’s candidacy is so outside the box of conventional Beltway thinking, they *still* cannot get their heads around that idea. 

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Milwaukee

While the pundits score last night's Republican debate, who zinged who, who looked "Presidential," who garnered the greatest applause lines, and gee whiz, weren't those moderators great?, a larger truth is unsurprisingly being obscured. In a friendly room packed with partisans and batting practice softballs, the hard right ideas that were articulated in Milwaukee - on taxes, on immigration, on foreign policy - may have played well, but arguing for the massive deportation of the undocumented, the starvation of federal tax revenue while spending mindlessly on the military, and shutting down entire federal agencies, will not play well in Peoria come general election time.

And this is a problem that any of the candidates on stage last night will struggle with. Marco Rubio can repackage his stump speech into small sound bites for a 90 second answer that go largely unchallenged by a friendly Fox Business News panelist, but he will have to answer to an ocean of advertising and pushback regarding his inexperience, his flip flop on immigration, his no-exemption stance on abortion, and his tax plan if he is nominated for President. The same is true for Ted Cruz (my pick for who will win the nomination), who wants to shut down five government agencies (though he only remembered four - must be something in the water in Texas) and whose religiosity will be a turn off for millions of Americans. 

Of course, if the primary electorate somehow toggles toward the mainstream, the relative moderation of a guy like John Kasich will cause the right wing elements within the Republican Party to blanche and the limp effort by Jeb Bush thus far suggests that but for his last name, he would have been written off long ago. Chris Christie was a rising star once upon a time, but between his middling record in New Jersey and the embarrassing "Bridgegate" scandal, he has been relegated to the "kid's table" debate and is now an also ran. The rest of the field are non-starters on the national stage. Trump is a bloviating egomaniac, Fiorina appears allergic to the truth and is a fact checker's wet dream, and Ben Carson does not appear to know more than a thimbleful of information about anything that one needs to be President. 

And this does not even take into account the "Blue Wall" of states that have voted Democratic in each of the last six Presidential elections and will hand Hillary Clinton 90 percent of the electoral votes she will need to be elected, leaving her free to contest the handful of states to get her to 270. Couple that with the extreme views being espoused during these debates - instant fodder for devastating 30 second attack ads - the demographic shifts that continue to favor the Democrats, President Obama's surging popularity and the contrasting economic success of the two most recent Democrats in the White House versus the past three Republicans, and you start to see why the Republican debates are just exercises in deciding who will lose next November.

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The Battle In Boulder

Last night's CNBC debate has been roundly panned. The moderators are being blamed for asking bad questions and for failing to control the stage. Candidates blithely uttered empty rhetoric without pushback from the journalists or each other and the network could not even get the debate started on time.

These are all fair criticisms. But I would argue that in this chaos an important thing happened. Like hockey's recently adopted three-on-three overtime rules, the unwieldy flow of conversation combined with some candidates' clear desperation to attract attention and have "a moment" as they say in the business these days, resulted in some very important takeaways:

• Jeb Bush Is Done. Like a silent movie actor who did not adapt to "talkies," Bush is a politician from a prior era who has not been able to make the transition to today's campaigning. Whether it has been his tin ear for social media or penchant for putting his foot in his mouth, he has floated on "inevitability" and his family name for months while his campaign has sunk like a stone. But last night may have been the death knell. He threw a tentative jab at Marco Rubio and Rubio was ready to counter-punch, flicking aside the older man's zinger and coming over the top with a haymaker. Bush spent the rest of the debate mostly silent and when he did speak, touted his fantasy football team. One would have thought it impossible for someone to make his brother George W. look deft and intelligent, but somehow Jeb managed this trick.
• The Rise of Generation X. I am roughly the same age as both Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and while I find their politics odious, I must tip my hat to their understanding of the modern media environment. Rubio sidestepped a high and tight pitch about his shady dealings in Florida (all of which were totally within bounds to ask about and accurate to boot) and Cruz dropped the line of the night when he flashed his Princeton-honed debating skills in skewering the moderators with a real time critique of their questions. That a candidate who has skipped out on his job (and readily admitted as much) and whose rise has been lubricated with a billionaire's largesse, and another one who espouses extreme right wing views on basically every subject under the sun, came out looking like winners should tell you something.
• Joisey Attitude. Given even small openings, Governor Chris Christie displayed some of the natural political chops that once made him a favorite among the GOP donor base. He also took a swing at the moderators and used each opportunity provided to drive home his message. It may not end up making a difference in his polling, but Christie sold his version of governing (which those of us in New Jersey know was, well, a bit exaggerated) while coming off as someone who would not shrink from a debate with Hillary.
• A Kinder, Gentler Trump. Other than the quick strike oppo dump he did on John Kasich (whose shellshocked reaction ended whatever flow he was trying to establish), Trump's shtick was toned down compared to previous debates. I will be interested to see if this version of Trump, equal parts dorsal-fin-flashing shark and guy-now-trying-to-talk-policy works for voters. Trump himself recognized the hedged bet, using his closing statement to take a pot shot at CNBC and bragging about how he re-negotiated the terms of the debate to everyone's benefit.
• Everyone Else. With Rubio, Cruz, Christie, and to a lesser extent, Trump, sucking up most of the oxygen, the also-rans were Rand Paul (why are you still in this race, sir?), Mike Huckabee (ditto), Ben Carson (a paper tiger if you ever saw one who is out of his depth after 15 seconds), and Carly Fiorina (slick presentations may work in the boardroom, but you've been exposed as a shitty CEO and liar on the debate stage). 

In another era, after a debate like this, one or more of the candidates circling the drain below 5% would drop out and maybe even a guy like Bush would reexamine whether he should continue, but as was shown in 2012, all a candidate needs to do is get hot at the right time and suddenly they could find themselves in the "finals" for a 50/50 crack at being the most powerful person in the world. 

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The Campaign About Nothing

Russell: What's the show about?

George: Nothing.

Russell: Then why am I watching it?

George: Because it's on TV. [1]

A quarter century after Seinfeld parodied itself, the Republican candidates for President have taken that iconic program to its logical conclusion - a reductio ad absurdum exercise in banality aided and abetted by a willing press corps more interested in acting performances, manufactured slap fights, and triviality than the important business of deciding who should be our nation's leader.

This bizarre incentive structure encourages over-the-top behavior to garner media attention. As was noted on (of all places) The McLaughlin Group, many of the questions posed in the second GOP debate were modeled on (of all things) The Real Housewives franchise, where one "housewife" says something mean about another "housewife" and then the latter is asked to comment on what the former said. Essentially, Jake Tapper acted as that smarmy kid in school who walks up to someone and says "you won't believe the shit so and so said about you" and then steps away to watch the fight.  

Further, because so much of the "reporting" that goes on these days focuses on the horse race aspect of the primary (that is, on polls, not policy), it is no wonder that a guy like Donald Trump spends most of what passes for his stump speeches patting himself on the back for leading in those polls. Polls = popularity = attention by the chattering class = more popularity = higher polls in a virtuous cycle that redounds to the benefit of whoever is riding the crest of that wave.

While the media has done its best to ridicule and mock Trump, demand policy prescriptions from him, and otherwise attempt to pierce his balloon, the dirty little secret they are reluctant to admit is that his popularity, along with that of Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and even Ted Cruz, reflects the true mainstream of Republican orthodoxy. The longer this goes on, the conventional wisdom inside the Beltway that the "adults in the room" - the Jeb Bushes or John Kasichs - will bubble to the surface once Republican primary voters get their wits about them, looks more and more foolish. 

Perhaps this is because the idea that policies matter is no longer applicable in a party that does not live in the (to borrow from a W-era apparatchik) "reality-based world." When a large portion of your party does not believe the President is a Christian or that the deficit has gone down on his watch not up, objective "truth" no longer matters. That insiders are stunned at Trump's rise is amusing if only because he espouses little more than the greatest hits from Fox News in the age of Obama - anchor babies, illegal immigration, repealing Obamacare, a weak foreign policy - while putting some New York attitude behind it. 

And even if policies did matter, the media is doing a lousy job reporting about them. Do not get me wrong, it is not like they provide no coverage of policy pronouncements, it is just that the proportion of that coverage is a fraction of the ink and airtime used on the latest dust-up or Trump insult. Examples abound, but to take just two, consider Jeb Bush's tax policy. It was announced about 2 weeks ago to almost no fanfare even though an analysis of it indicated that more than 53% of the benefits of his policy would benefit the top 1% of income earners. [2] What coverage was provided focused mainly on his willingness to scrap the so-called "carried interest" loophole, an idea championed by Democrats for years and recently supported by Donald Trump. Bush got a lot of credit in the media for including this idea, but the reality is that the loophole's closure would bring in less than $20 billion a year to the Treasury - less than 1% of the overall "cost" of Bush's plan - and his other giveaways to the wealthy would more than make up for this loss. In other words, Bush got credit for taking a penny away from the rich and no criticism for giving them a dollar in return. 

Similarly, Carly Fiorina was roundly praised for her performance at the second GOP debate. She was declared the winner because she seemed in control of the room and fluent in both foreign and domestic policy. Of course, a riff about the Sixth Fleet and increasing troops in Western Europe sounded impressive, and she spoke with great passion (but little accuracy) about Planned Parenthood, but within a day, four (!) falsehoods or misstatements she uttered in a scant 15 seconds were flagged. [3] Those errors, which once upon a time would have mattered - flat out lies used to mean something - were brushed aside because she was being judged not on the probity of what she said, but what it did for her, wait for it, poll numbers. She was, to use the media's preferred buzzword this cycle, "authentic," even if she was lying through her teeth.

In Matt Bai's outstanding book All The Truth Is Out he argues that the tabloidization of national media coverage began in 1988, when Gary Hart's campaign was taken down amid rumors of an extramarital affair and peaked during Bill Clinton's time in office. Since then, while sex still sells, caricaturing candidates has proven equally effective in belittling them - Al Gore was a phony, John Kerry was an effete flip-flopper, Mitt Romney, a soulless corporate takeover artist (ok, that last one was true) - while excusing the press from doing its job of questioning the ideas, not the motivations or personalities, of those they cover. If Jeb Bush's idea to privatize Medicare, Mike Huckabee's suggestion that the rule of law can be ignored, or Lindsey Graham's call for tens of thousands of troops in Iraq get a <shoulder shrug emoji> from the press because they are too busy dissecting Donald Trump's latest insult, why should they be surprised that candidates traffic in invective, the populace is so ill informed, and we blankly stare at the freak show on television?

That candidates are going to respond to the best ways to get attention is unsurprising - after all, they are politicians trying to get elected, but the media has abdicated its role as fact checker in favor of becoming carnival barkers because their incentive structure is no longer built on objectivity, but rather, on ratings, clicks, and page views.  

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END NOTES

1. The Pitch, Season 4, Episode 3.

2. On this, he has outdone his brother, who "only" handed over 40% of the benefits of his tax cuts to the 1%. http://www.vox.com/2015/9/15/9326453/jeb-bush-tax-plan-distribution

3. http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/watch-carly-fiorina-make-4-bogus-claims-in-15-seconds-529726531954