Mike Huckabee suggested he would defy the Supreme Court in order to ban abortion, because it’s “not the Supreme Being,” while Marco Rubio denied that he supports abortion rights for rape and incest victims, and Scott Walker defended his opposition to abortion when the mother’s life is at risk. Ben Carson came out for a tithe-like 10 percent across-the-board flat tax, because “God’s a pretty fair guy,” while Huckabee suggested he would tax “pimps, prostitutes and illegals” to raise money for Social Security. In the earlier debate among also-rans, Bobby Jindal said he would direct his Internal Revenue Service to investigate Planned Parenthood on Day One, which sounded like a potentially impeachable way to start a presidency.
None of those policy statements seemed particularly newsworthy last night, because Donald Trump didn’t make them, but they gave a fairly consistent sense of the Republican primary. Moderation does not appear to be a popular strategy. And while nobody would mistake Trump for a policy wonk, his dominance of the media is clearly casting a policy shadow, shoving his rivals not only towards Trump-like policies but towards Trump-style brashness in a Trump-driven conversation. “If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t even be talking about illegal immigration,” he blustered last night.
Does anyone doubt that he’s right?
So there was apparently unanimous agreement among the 17 Republican candidates in the two debates that America faces an illegal immigration crisis, and that the southern border is laughably insecure. Trump was attacked for saying positive things about single-payer health care in Canada, but not for saying nasty things about immigrants from Mexico; even John Kasich, probably the closest approximation to a moderate on the debate stage, suggested that Trump was tapping into legitimate public frustrations. Everyone on the stage also seemed to agree that President Obama’s Iran deal is a disaster negotiated by losers, that the U.S. military is falling apart, and that the world has become a much scarier place—or, as Trump put it, “as bad as it’s ever been in terms of medieval horror.”
Of course, it’s not as if the Trump spectacle has suddenly pushed the GOP candidates to the right; the race has always pitted establishment conservatives against Tea Party conservatives, and last night reflected that. There was lots of bragging about tax cuts. There were thunderous calls for repealing Obamacare—although Kasich made a surprisingly ardent defense of his decision to expand Medicaid—and widespread agreement that religious liberty is under attack in Obama’s America. When Ted Cruz ripped the Republican leaders in Congress as untrustworthy squishes, nobody defended them. For that matter, when Trump defended himself against moderator Megyn Kelly’s accusations of sexism by complaining about political correctness run amok, nobody took Kelly’s side.
There were a couple moments in the so-called JV debate that showed just how anxious the candidates are to avoid the “moderate" label. Lindsey Graham was asked how Republicans could trust him, since he once worked with Democrats on climate legislation. He said that he could attack Hillary Clinton for trying to destroy the economy with cap-and-trade—a policy he used to support—without getting bogged down in a debate over science. Later, George Pataki was asked about being the only pro-choice candidate in the primary. He said he was “appalled” by abortion, and vowed to defund Planned Parenthood and end taxpayer funding for abortion.
Graham and Pataki are both polling at less than 1 percent, but neither one saw any upside in emphasizing their differences with their rivals on even one issue.
By contrast, Kasich did seem willing to challenge party orthodoxy—not only on Medicaid expansion, which he defended with a passionate speech about helping people with mental illnesses and drug addictions, but when he was asked about his opposition to gay marriage. He said he was a traditional guy, but he also said he accepts the Supreme Court’s ruling, and that he recently attended a gay wedding; he ended his answer with a poignant soliloquy about unconditional love.
It was a stark contrast with all the tough-guy talk about cracking down on ISIS and Iran and illegals, about the weakness of Obama and Hillary Clinton. Walker described their approach as “mush,” and promised to replace it with “steel.” Carson seemed to endorse waterboarding prisoners, and complained that the way we now fight our wars is too “politically correct.” This global outlook was where the Trump influence sounded especially strong; his rivals sometimes tried to sound optimistic notes, but even if they didn’t quite echo his warnings that China and Japan and Mexico were kicking America’s collective butt, they certainly sounded themes of danger and decline, as if everything had gone to hell since 2009.
This will be a tougher argument to make when there aren’t just Republicans on the stage. Unemployment has dropped from double digits to 5.3 percent since 2010; Walker and Christie bragged about job creation in their states, but the moderators pointed out that their states have actually lagged the rest of the country. The budget deficit, oil imports, and illegal immigration are all way down. Federal spending is growing at the slowest rate in over half a century. The world may sound scary, but fewer American soldiers are getting killed patrolling it.
Last night, though, Republicans described a fallen world in need of action-hero leaders. “This country is in big trouble,” Trump said. And nobody disagreed.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered