One of the three CNBC panelists for the Republican presidential debate in Colorado made clear earlier in the day that he wasn’t looking for dry policy discussions.
“We’ve had fireworks up to this point. I think the fireworks will just be as big if not bigger,” [Carl] Quintanilla said in an interview. […]
“[W]e hopefully won’t need to go in there with a blow torch. The fires are going to get stoked and it is the moderators job to make sure those fires don’t die,” [Carl] Quintanilla said. “[T]he race is getting serious. This is about the economy, which is our wheel house, and our hope is this gives the candidates a different set of pitches at which to swing and I think that will, it will mark a turning point in the race one way or another.”
The biggest home runs on stage last night came when candidates swung at the debate moderators. For once, Republican whining about the “mainstream media” was mostly justified.
Senator Ted Cruz got some of the loudest applause when he turned a question about whether he was “the kind of problem solver American voters want” into an attack on the moderators.
“The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media,” Ted Cruz said with considerable disgust. “This is not a cage match.”
Cruz ticked off the insults the CNBC moderators had lobbed Wednesday night at the assembled Republicans. “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?”
I couldn’t help nodding my head, because most of the questions panelists had asked up to that point were poorly-conceived, with the exception of Becky Quick pressing Ben Carson on his unrealistic tax plan. Click here for the Washington Post’s full debate transcript.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s biggest applause line came when he bashed the panelist who asked Bush whether fantasy football should be regulated like gambling.
“Are we really talking about getting the government involved in fantasy football?” he asked John Harwood, one of CNBC’s widely panned commentators. “We have $19 trillion in debt, we have people out of work, we have ISIS and Al Qaeda attacking us and we’re talking about fantasy football? Can we stop? How about this? How about we get the government to do what they’re supposed to be doing. Secure our borders, protect our people and support American values and American families. Enough on fantasy football. People play, who cares?”
Shortly thereafter Christie drew laughs and applause when he responded to Harwood’s interruptions with, “Do you want me to answer or do you want to answer? […] Because, I’ve got to tell you the truth, even in New Jersey what you’re doing is called rude.”
NBC released a one-sentence statement after the debate: “People who want to be president of the United States should be able to answer tough questions.” Absolutely. I’m all for moderators pressing the candidates. But the questions should be substantive, and journalists need to follow up consistently when candidates bob and weave. CNBC’s panelists didn’t do the job well. Lots of people noticed, not just partisans like Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus.
James Q. Lynch of the Cedar Rapids Gazette tweeted, “watching #GOPDebate moderators reminded me of how i feel every time i’m on TV debate panel: don’t suck, don’t suck, don’t suck.”
The Gazette’s Todd Dorman offered the biggest understatement I’ve heard in a while: “it wouldn’t be hard to come up with much better questions than these.” Dorman would know, because he was on one of the best debate panels I’ve ever seen. The other journalists assigned to that debate among the three Republican candidates for governor in 2010 were Paul Yeager of Iowa Public Television and Jeneane Beck of Iowa Public Radio. The transcript is available here; click through to read one concise and relevant question after another. I commented at the time,
Too many journalists ask long-winded questions that are easy to evade, or ask about hot topics of no lasting importance, or ask about policies outside the scope of the office the candidates are seeking.
In contrast, almost every question the panelists asked during Saturday’s debate was direct and addressed an issue the next governor of Iowa will face.
CNBC moderator Quintanilla saw his role as making sure the “fires don’t die.” Maybe he got the “fireworks” he was looking for, but he and his colleagues failed to make the debate “about the economy, which is our wheel house.” Instead, the story of last night was how CNBC botched the job, from failing to start on time (giving no explanation) to cutting away to previously recorded material shortly after the debate.
Here’s hoping CNBC’s flop will inspire other journalists to do better at the rest of this season’s presidential debates.
Other takeaways for me:
• For the first time, I agree with commentators who felt Senator Marco Rubio performed well. Early on, he parried Bush’s attack on his voting record, and he generally sounded confident, even when he was way off-base.
• Trump didn’t dominate the scene, but several of his answers packed a punch. His takedown of Ohio Governor John Kasich was brutal. I don’t think Trump hurt himself at all.
• On the other hand, Bush did nothing to change the growing consensus that his well-financed campaign is headed nowhere fast. He just isn’t a good campaigner.
• Carson lied when he denied having “any kind of relationship” with Mannatech, a nutritional supplement company he’s worked with for years. Mannatech has made outlandish claims about the health benefits of its products. I wonder whether some rival or super-PAC will seize on that relationship and/or Carson’s dishonesty as a way to dent his sky-high favorability numbers among Iowa Republicans. I suspect Mannatech would be a more promising angle than criticizing Carson’s ridiculous tax plan.
• As unpleasant as Cruz sounds to me, he seemed to hit all the right notes for hard-core conservatives. I think he will rise further in the polls over the next few weeks.
• Carly Fiorina didn’t deliver as many memorable lines as she did in the first two Republican debates, so claiming to be “Hillary Clinton’s worst nightmare” in her closing statement wasn’t convincing. As usual, some of her attention-grabbing assertions were false: in this case, “Ninety-two percent of the jobs lost during Barack Obama’s first term belonged to women” and “we have 470,000 going out of business every year” because of Obamacare.
• I can’t tell you who got the most speaking time, because different debate watchers came up with very different numbers. But they agreed that Senator Rand Paul got the least time to answer questions. Paul hasn’t been able to make himself heard much in any of the debates so far. His poor fundraising hasn’t left him with as many resources for paid media as many of his competitors. I’m increasingly starting to believe Paul could drop out of the race before the Iowa caucuses.
• Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee didn’t stand out either, but at least he had a chance to mix it up with Christie over raising the retirement age and means-testing Social Security. Saving Social Security from the GOP has been one of his campaign themes. I still think it’s a smart tactic to set himself apart in a crowded field, even if entitlement cuts haven’t been a salient enough issue for Huckabee to get traction so far.
• Christie was belligerent in a way that probably appeals to Republican audiences, but I don’t see him as many people’s first choice, and I don’t know what he can do to change that.
Any comments about the GOP presidential race are welcome in this thread.