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Debate roundup: Trophies for all!

Published on 63 Comments on Debate roundup: Trophies for all!

The moderators of tonight's Republican debate did pretty well! Despite Vivek Ramaswamy's best efforts to remain an asshole, they kept him pretty much under control. Everyone else, too. They mostly did this by asking questions instantly after each speaker had finished, a ploy that other moderators should emulate.

So who did best? Not Tim Scott, who just didn't do anything to make himself stand out. Not Ron DeSantis, who ducked and dodged all night and basically faded into the background.

Maybe Vivek Ramaswamy? I hate to say it, but he was better than usual this time around. He was less condescending in his tone and better at hitting his marks. His marks were mostly insane, mind you, but he hit them.

Chris Christie? He did OK, but let's face it: nobody takes him seriously.

Nikki Haley? She came across well, I thought. She might be the winner of the night.

But let's talk specifics. First off, what is "Biden's whale EZ pass lane"? That wasn't part of the debate, it was a commercial midway through. But what is it? Five seconds of googling didn't tell me, and after that I gave up.

The China bashing tonight was truly memorable. It was "can you top this?" the entire time. Nikki Haley wants to cut all trade ties! That would be something. Everyone wanted to ban TikTok, which is apparently the greatest threat America faces.

Lester Holt wanted to know what everyone would do to get prices down, and he wanted no tepid mush. He wanted to know what they'd do on DAY ONE, dammit. The answer for all of them was: gasoline. They would do.......something.......to get the price of gasoline down, which would put money in everyone's pockets. None of them acknowledged the basic fact that oil prices are set globally, which means that none of their proposals would have any effect. Nor did any of them seem to realize that the real price of gasoline is down very nearly to its pre-pandemic average:

Hugh Hewitt wanted to talk about the navy, but most of the candidates seemed to barely know we even have a navy—aside from knowing how many ships we have compared to China. But then Chris Christie saved the day by talking about ballistic missile submarines. Hewitt must have swooned. Replacing the Ohio class boomers has been an obsession of his for years, so this was right in his strike zone. Unfortunately, I doubt that any viewers even knew what Christie was talking about.

Nikki Haley became the latest candidate to suggest sending special ops troops into Mexico to take out fentanyl dealers. This would require a declaration of war against Mexico, which I suspect wouldn't go over too well. It's remarkable how casually Republicans say stuff like this. But it was just a small part of the discussion of fentanyl, which every candidate said they'd stop dead in its tracks by getting tough with someone or other. The problem with this is that fentanyl is too small to be effectively stopped. We can't even stop smuggling of cocaine and heroin, and those amount to thousands of tons per year. The entire US consumption of fentanyl, by contrast, could probably be smuggled in by about one fishing boat per month. There's very little that anyone can credibly promise to do about this.

There were some howlers. Ramaswamy said that prices had gone up but wages hadn't. He's too smart for this to be anything other than a lie. Haley said we should save money by expanding Medicare Advantage, seemingly unaware that MA costs more than traditional Medicare. Ramaswamy wanted to build a wall on the Canadian border. Tim Scott suggested that the way to save Social Security was to cut taxes. Huh?

On abortion, Nikki Haley insisted on honesty: Republicans don't have 60 votes in the Senate, so they aren't going to pass anything. This is absolutely true, but I've always wondered if this tactic works. Do viewers see it as truthtelling or as just another way to duck responsibility?

Finally, Tim Scott gets an award for making a good point on the subject of raising the retirement age for Social Security. It might not seem like it to us, he said, pointing at his fellow panelists, but for a manual worker it's not so easy to keep working until you're 70. He's right about that, and it's not something you usually hear Republicans acknowledge.

63 thoughts on “Debate roundup: Trophies for all!”

  1. kennethalmquist

    Thanks for watching so the rest of us don't have to. I take it that no one had a negative word to say about Trump?

    1. KawSunflower

      Beat me to it. The first was intolerable, & I could not abide even The Washington Post's conservative columnists' analyses on this go-round.
      .
      Still, I wonder if anyone ever just confronts our bombastic politicians about their attitudes about international law, especially after this last two years & Russia, Ukraine, Hamas, & Israel. Scary people - especially with Haley referencing her foreign policy "expertise. "

    2. MeghanTrainor

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  2. D_Ohrk_E1

    Unless there's a late entry to upset things, Nikki Haley is going to be the nominee. She's the kinder gentler vision that Daddy Bush envisioned of the GOP.

    Trump isn't going to be the nominee.

    The recent poll claiming to show that he was ahead had also revealed that voters would not choose Trump if he's convicted. He's going to be convicted, at least once, in the middle of primary season.

    We might luck out if Trump picks her as his VP and she agrees, before he is convicted.

    2. treeeetop57

      The poll showed general election voters would not elect Trump. It says nothing about Republican primary voters, who would vote for him if he were convicted of shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

      3. kennethalmquist

        Specifically, about six percent of voters in selected battleground states said they would switch their votes from Trump to Biden if Trump were convicted. As you say, there is no basis for assuming that you'd get the same result if you polled Republican primary voters. Furthermore, in recent polls put Trump above 56%, so even if a conviction caused his support from Republican primary voters to drop by six percent, he would still have 50%, with no one else even close.

    3. Yehouda

      "He's going to be convicted, at least once,..."

      You sure about that?
      They will need to find very brave jury members to convivt him in a criminal case. I am not convinced that they can.

    4. Atticus

      I pray that you are correct. I'm just not sure the timing of the trials will work out. And, "the middle of primary season" may be too late.

    5. KenSchulz

      That’s not how cult members behave. When the leader is persecuted, it just proves that he is on the side of Right! and Truth! They will cling even closer.
      In any case, I doubt there will be a verdict before the election — Trump has a lot of experience delaying court proceedings.
      And relying on a single poll, with a nonresponse rate above 90%, is foolish.

      1. D_Ohrk_E1

        I'm betting that most voters are stuck in an echo chamber and a conviction will pierce it in a way that destroys their confidence in the source of their info that insisted that he was innocent.

        1. KenSchulz

          Nope. It was the Deep State getting to the jurors. Or the FBI manufacturing fake evidence. Or witnesses perjuring themselves. Anything but actual guilt.

  3. rick_jones

    But let's talk specifics. First off, what is "Biden's whale EZ pass lane"?

    Two possibilities come to mind. The restrictions on crabbing (West Coast) and/or lobstering (East Coast), and/or restrictions on ship speeds (both coasts?) in the name of protecting whales.

    1. jte21

      Since when do Republicans give a shit about fisheries? On the west coast, at least, they're doing their damn best to make sure no living thing flourishes in those waters ever again, whether it's by ignoring climate change (snow crabs have probably disappeared from Alaskan waters for good), or diverting river water for agriculture in the Central Valley and elsewhere.

    2. kaleberg

      Could they be referring to political corruption? A whale, in Los Vegas, is a high roller, a much desired customer. Maybe "Biden's whale EZ pass lane" is about giving big political spenders or perhaps his son a way of avoiding prosecution,

      It could also be about some supposed Biden administration plan to control whale traffic by electronically tagging them, but those whales don't vote. I know this sounds insane, but we are talking about Republicans here.

  4. Justin

    The media is unwatchable this morning (and unreadable) because they feel like they need to cover this abomination. In other news:

    US forces under fire in Middle East as America slides towards brink.

    US carries out new strikes against facility used by Iran in Syria

    Transgender people can be baptized Catholic, serve as godparents, Vatican says
    Hilarious -Why would they want to?

    As crisis deepens, Cubans scramble to migrate by any means

    Reuters.com

    1. J. Frank Parnell

      But the NYT was still able to take time to diss Biden over the recent election results: “Elections Buoy Biden for Now, But ‘24 Looms”.

    2. E-6

      I myself would happily be relegated to the non-express lanes of highways if I got to watch Rice's Whales whizzing by me in the EZ Pass lane.

    4. Altoid

      Wapo has a more comprehensive piece on it here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/09/26/whale-gulf-mexico-rices-oil/

      "EZ pass lane" is just completely nonsensical, though. The tldr is that this is a newly-designated species that lives only in US waters and is down to 50 examples. The admin wants to alter some new oil leases that are coming up for auction and to restrict boat traffic around the known habitat; API, Chevron, and Louisiana are suing (you know, the little guy).

      So most likely what we're looking at here is an astrosurf group whose ad agency doesn't live anywhere near an EZ pass state and has no idea how EZ pass works but thought it sounded good. If you actually use EZ pass-- northeast and Great Lakes, I think-- all you can do is shake your head and go "huh?"

      1. KenSchulz

        Maybe they are confusing E-ZPass with High Occupancy/Toll (HOT) lanes, which some see as elitist, because you can buy your way into a lane intended to encourage ride-sharing?
        For over a decade I had a weekly commute across the Tappan Zee Bridge and down the Garden State Parkway to the Atlantic City exit. E-ZPass was great, and even better as they converted toll plazas to full speed.

        2. Altoid

          HOV lanes sounds sorta right, since the idea they want to ridicule is reserving areas of the surface for whales at night by restricting boat traffic. They seem to want people to interpret "EZ pass" as giving the whales a free ride or something like that. Not a very well-developed concept, but then maybe they're not dealing with a full deck on this. Oil and gas producers have generally been more about leaning on legislatures and less about public opinion-shaping.

          I've liked how EZ pass works and the high-speed lanes are convenient, and it's really easier for things like the Thousand Islands bridges (which have toll-takers). OTOH I didn't like the way it was used to eliminate unionized toll-takers on the PA Turnpike, a long-time goal of commissioners-- cash tolls were something like double or more the EZ pass tolls, so I finally felt forced to throw in the towel (for complicated reasons the PA pike tolls are way higher than anything else in the northeast). It's convenient, but has had its downsides.

  7. Yehouda

    "Tim Scott suggested that the way to save Social Security was to cut taxes. Huh?"

    They were cutting taxes since Reagan, and Social Security is atill alive. Q.E.D.

    1. name99

      It is a FACT, regardless of what you might think, that during Reagan's term
      - various tax rates came down
      - federal revenue went up, and substantially so

      You can complain about all sorts of other nebulous things, like whether aspects of this were "fair", or the extent to which expenditures rose with those revenues, but those are the facts. In this particular case (just like the Kennedy tax cuts) the Laffer curve worked as claimed.

      Now I have no idea what Tim Scott means, and maybe he himself does not know, but it is not impossible that we are once again in a Laffer type situation and that such cuts would result in more general revenue and (especially if the SS tax cap were tweaked as part of such a quid pro quo) in more revenue especially marked as "for Social Security".

      1. KenSchulz

        You better have citations, because that noted left-wing rag, Forbes, says revenues went down, so much that the cuts were partially reversed: https://www.forbes.com/sites/taxnotes/2021/09/03/reagans-tax-cut-just-turned-40---and-its-still-the-most-important-tax-reform-since-world-war-ii/?sh=5473c4d95d14
        One thing that happened during Reagan’s administration is that high inflation pushed people into higher-rate brackets. That attenuated the effect of lower rates.

      2. ColBatGuano

        - various tax rates came down
        - federal revenue went up, and substantially so

        Now explain how those are casually linked. Take your time.

      3. Altoid

        At least three things happened that brought up revenues over the course of Reagan's terms. One is the partial reversal of the tax cuts that KenShulz mentions. A second is the bracket creep. Third is the very large increase in Social Security payroll taxes that the Greenspan Commission recommended in order to build up a surplus over then-current SS expenditures that would cover benefits for the coming baby-boomer retirees.

        The surplus funds went into a special non-market category of Treasury obligations, but the dollar surplus itself was credited to the unified federal budget and counted against deficits. (This didn't just help Reagan-- it was why Clinton had the short-lived budget "surplus" that was the excuse for W's then-massive tax cuts). It was a highly regressive method of increasing federal revenue, if that's how we want to look at it.

        Reagan was the biggest and most committed Keynesian of his day. He just didn't acknowledge it (and if you believe David Stockman, had no idea that's what he was doing).

      4. KenSchulz

        FICA is a percentage of payroll, set by Congress and rarely changed. The revenue from it may only be used for Old Age, Survivors’ and Disability Insurance (OASDI). No general revenues have ever been used to fund these programs, so income tax rates have no effect on their funding.

  8. Kalimac

    No, we wouldn't need to declare war on Mexico to send our special ops troops there.

    Woodrow Wilson didn't.

    Hey, you want to read about a military operation so disastrous it makes W. in Iraq look competent, check up on Wilson's invasion of Mexico. It even had an equivalent of Ahmed Chalabi: a charming rogue who briefly fooled everybody into thinking he was the desired fixer. His name was Pancho Villa.

  9. different_name

    The whole episode was like watching over-caffeinated high school gunners explaining why they should be Class Secretary.

    Given that I was rooting for injuries, it was a great "debate". My favorites:

    - Ramaswamy, the smarmy asshole who sells drugs to his friends and then rats them out when he's busted,

    - Haley, the matron-wannabe who doesn't have the presence to pull off Glares of Disapproval, so she just looks constipated.

    As an aside, I'd just point out the guy modeling the best ethics on stage was the one who shut down major bridges to mess with another politician over endorsements, reportedly stranding ambulances in traffic, and was famously photographed sunbathing on closed beaches during Covid.

    Class acts all around.

  10. Salamander

    I listened for a few minutes, which was all I could take, and hear Vivek insist that as President and CEO of the United States, he would institute "Zero Base Budgeting." I guess he's never heard ot "Congress."

    There was also noise about "high gas prices", by which they meant "gasoline". Yeah. Yesterday, regular unleaded was $2.93, contrasting sharply with the near $4 of a few months ago.

    I then turned off the teevie until 8pm, when Nova came on. Ironically, it was about how China became a world-class technical force. Hint: they have an amazing work ethic, which Americans have only observed lately in its illegal immigrant population.

  11. Goosedat

    The question of should the US attack Iran in retaliation for Iraqi militias firing missiles at the American troops occupying Iraq was reminiscent of 2002.

  12. Wichitawstraw

    The entire yearly supply of illegal Fent consumption can fit in the back of four pick up trucks. This is what happens with prohibition. Drugs always get stronger so they take up less room when you smuggle them. The only solution is legalizing all drugs. Passing a constitutional amendment that outlaws advertising them or selling them for profit. Take the entire interdiction budget and put it into marketing against taking drugs.

  13. crispdavid672887

    I agree that the debate was better managed, but the lack of good questions with meaningful follow-ups really hurt. For example, Haley said she has nothing against pro-choice people and hopes they have nothing against pro-life people. But these propositions are not at all the same. I know of nobody who is pro-choice who would force pro-life people to get abortions. But the reverse isn't true.
    Several candidates called for acts of war against Mexico and Iran. Does anyone in either party still believe that only Congress can declare war?
    And they all wanted to pump up production of fossil fuels with no reference to climate or long-term sustainability. Republican primary voters may not care about climate, but the rest of the world sure does.

  14. Aleks311

    There's a much bigger issue with setting a later retirement age than the fraction of people in physical jobs: rampant age discrimination in the workplace. Our current laws might sound good on paper, but they have fewer teeth than a newly hatched chicken. I'm a ridiculously healthy 56 year old, looking for a white collar job in a hot job market with a solid resume-- but it's been months now and no offers. The phone interviews go well, but video interviews result in rapid rejections. Managers, or maybe HR departments, only want young'uns even in jobs that require significant experience.

    1. KJK

      I feel your pain, and was in a similar situation about a decade ago, when I was laid off from a large financial services company. At the company paid outplacement service, the instructor informed us that starting at age 40, they recommend "de-aging" your resume, to make it harder for prospective employers to determine your age (until you show up at an interview). Quite depressing.

      Only folks who seemed to get hired from my business were direct origination professionals. The basic deal was that they had 6 - 9 months to produce (close deals), or they were out again.

      Large employees managing lay offs, or reduction in force, are careful to avoid age discrimination laws suits, and manage such events to minimize such exposure. Only case I personally know that was successful was when a manager, in front of HR, asked how can I fire that old fuck. He did just fine and was bridged to full retirement.

  15. Batchman

    "Howlers"?

    "Ramaswamy said that prices had gone up but wages hadn't. He's too smart for this to be anything other than a lie."

    ISTR some fellow named Kevin Drum repeatedly insisting that wages hadn't gone up, when adjusting for inflation. Of course, by the same principle prices haven't gone up either.

    "Haley said we should save money by expanding Medicare Advantage, seemingly unaware that MA costs more than traditional Medicare."

    Well, it costs more for the consumer, but it saves money for the government, at least in theory.

    1. MikeTheMathGuy

      This is not the place to debate it, but I'll just mention that Medicare Advantage plans seem to vary wildly depending on where you live. I've seen some people describe the plans available in their area as not much better than scams. At the other end, the plan I'm on costs me $35 a month, which I more than make up for just with fairly typical use of the prescription drug benefit alone. I doubt Haley has any serious policy proposal behind her suggestion, but I wonder if there aren't some possibilities for improved efficiency in there somewhere.

    2. KJK

      Medicare Advantage plans cost the consumers much less than a medigap policy plus Part D coverage and usually offer more services. Apparently MA cost the government more than straight Medicare Part A & B, but of course it provides for the "gap" between what is billed by providers and how much Medicare alone will pay.

      MA leaves it up to a private, for profit company to interpret Medicare coverage policies and potentially deny services that Medicare may approve. Most MA plans include a network of providers (more limited service providers).

  17. name99

    I know some extremely pro-Trump Republicans (tradespeople I deal with, like my smog check guy), and I gotta say they LOVE Vivek and are cautiously optimistic about Nikki.

    I put this out here because (though I know it will have absolutely no effect) kinda strange, isn't it, that the party that's supposedly 100% racist and patriarchal is so keen on these two people?
    It's almost like when Leftists throw out "racist" as an insult, it's now completely unmoored from any connection to reality of any form whatsoever...

    2. Crissa

      Unmoored, the anonymous poster says, without giving any examples of concrete examples.

      Tom Scott and Nicki Haley advocate policies with racist, misogynistic, bigoted results. Their ethnic background is immaterial to this fact.

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