A couple weeks ago I said to a co-worker that the night before I had done the geekiest of things, I watched the Republican Presidential Debate in its entirety. "Why would you do that?" she asked. Siting a bit of ancient wisdom filtered through Michael Corleone I responded: "because it's good to keep your friends close and your enemies closer."
But in all seriousness, while I may never vote for any of these candidates for anything, ever, I always find it a good idea to keep an open mind because as I've pointed out in this space time and again, I might actually learn something.
There were a few surprises for me this go around. Perhaps the biggest was the number of times the word "woke" was mentioned by Ron DeSantis in the debate, zero. It seemed clear in this reboot of his campaign, the third or fourth (I've lost count), his handlers must have advised him that his incessant use of the term had become tiresome. That bit of advice was sound.
I do question his general approach to the debate however. He seemed like a carnival automaton, whenever called upon by the moderators, it was as if they were putting coins into the slot, and out would come a diatribe on one the of talking points near and dear to the hearts of the limited scope of Americans he hopes to attract.
You could tell he was playing to the crowd with lines such as leaving drug cartel members "stone cold dead."
Unfortunately, for the Americans whom he is not trying to attract, stone cold dead best describes the feelings they have for him. To them, me included, Ron DeSantis is Donald Trump without the charm.
Vivek Ramaswamy's star both rose and fell, depending upon which side you're on. He was certainly the most visible and audible of all the folks on the stage in Milwaukee that night, in both the number of words coming out of his mouth, and those coming out of his opponents attacking him. As his hero the exPOTUS, Ramaswamy understands that any attention, good or bad, works in his favor.
He spent an endless amount of time talking in circles uttering nonsense, proving himself to be the true heir apparent to the former president. I must say though, he was slick, he handled the barbs coming his way from Mike Pence, Nikki Haley and especially Chris Christie with aplomb with perfectly timed comebacks. But I suspect his comment that Climate Change is a hoax didn't win him any support outside of the MAGA base, or even inside it with younger voters. It was certainly a deal breaker for a large segment of Americans.
I thought Mike Pence gave a solid performance, perhaps because I didn't have particularly high expectations for him. He had the best one-liner of the evening when asked if presidents over a certain age should be required to take a mental competency test. Pence dispensed with that thought by saying perhaps everyone in Washington should be asked to take one. He made a good case convincing at least some of the MAGA faithful that he did the right thing on January 6th. When confronted by the question of Pence's actions on that fateful day, most of the candidates on the stage talked around the issue but at least grudgingly paid lip service to the former vice president. The exception was Chris Christie who said unequivocally that Americans owe Pence a great deal of gratitude. He's right.
Speaking of Christie, his role along with Asa Hutchinson (interestingly positioned together on the far left of the dais) as flies-in-the-ointment, attacking the former president, made them persona-non-grata among the highly partisan MAGA audience, drawing jeers and boos every time they opened their mouths. Christie was a little disappointing, probably because the opportunities to address the issue were few and far between. He had to interject his Mike Pence comment because the moderators were ready to move on to another topic before he got a chance to respond. In what seemed to be an obvious attempt by the FOX News moderators to limit Christie's time slamming the exPOTUS, late in the debate, Christie was asked about UFOs. The most memorable Christie moments were his jabs at Vivek Ramaswamy, at one point saying the 38 year old entrepreneur and presidential wannabie sounded like "ChatGPT". That made me feel really old and out of touch because I had to look up a contemporary cultural reference made by a Republican presidential candidate.
The real disappointment of the night was Tim Scott who didn't manage to set himself apart from the pack in any way, shape or form. The biggest response to one of his remarks came when he stridently proclaimed that his first act as president would be to fire Attorney General Merrick Garland. Of course, being a Cabinet position, every new president appoints a new AG, so saying that is like saying the first thing he would do after being sworn in is give a speech. Duh.
North Dakota Governor Doug Bergum seemed like a nice and reasonable guy. His biggest moment came when it was revealed that he had suffered a torn Achilles tendon while (at 67), playing in a pickup basketball game in Milwaukee earlier that day. He made it through the debate, standing the whole time and turning in a respectable if not particularly memorable performance. He may not exactly be the Willis Reed of politics, but his calm demeanor was a welcome relief from all the noise and the fact that he made it through the two-hour ordeal enduring what must have been incredible pain was impressive by itself. The dark horse candidate made himself known to everyone who watched the debate. Unfortunately, most of them have forgotten him by now.
I've given up trying to predict the future, especially the outcomes of elections. There's plenty of evidence in this space that practically right up to the 2016 election, I didn't think Donald Trump had a snowball's chance in hell of ever becoming president.
Recalling that, I'm not going to bother to predict what will happen in November, 2024.
Instead, I will offer an opinion that you can easily discount but can't possibly prove wrong which is this: if a general election for president were to be held in the coming few weeks between Joe Biden and any of the men standing on the stage in Milwaukee (and the one who didn't show up), Joe Biden would probably win.
The woman is another story.
In my book, the hands down winner of the first Republican presidential debate was Nikki Haley. I'll add this: if a general election were held today between her and the president, she could beat Joe Biden, perhaps handily.
Obviously, that's a moot point because she would have to win her party's nomination before she could run in a general election. And at least judging by the way things look now, that ain't gonna happen because A) Donald Trump is leading the polls by a whopping margin and B) Haley said little in the debate that would sway anyone in the Trump base away from him and towards her.
So how could Nikki Haley have possibly won the debate?
It's simple, because she and the dudes who participated in the debate, with the possible exception of DeSantis, are running for the 2028 nomination, not the current one.
There's the answer to the question many of us have which is why so many Republican candidates are running in an election they know they have no chance of winning.
It's the future stupid (I'm talking to myself here), and the road to the White House is a long haul that typically spans several election cycles. I can't count the number of times Joe Biden ran for president before he won in 2020*. Donald Trump was publicly talking about running for president (albeit as a pro-choice Democrat) all the way back in the eighties. His predecessor Barack Obama, while a relative newbie in the public eye, gained national attention four years before his election as a newly elected senator from Illinois in 2004 when he introduced himself to the nation by giving this inspirational keynote address to the DNC in Boston.
The cold reality is that it takes more than public support to become president, it takes money, gobs of it. The candidates we saw on that stage in Milwaukee beyond trying to get the public's attention, are all vying for funds to build up their campaign treasury. The folks with gobs of money on hand willing to contribute to a political candidate, do so because they expect some kind of payback in the end. That payback only comes if the candidate they support can actually win the general election, not just the party nomination.
Naturally the big contributors not only look for candidates who might give them something they want, but they also hedge their bets on the candidates they feel have the best chance of winning.
It was clear from her performance during the debate that Nikki Haley was looking beyond the Republican primary to the general election.
For example, Haley understands that the draconian anti-abortion stance Republicans have taken is not a winning strategy, not at the state level, even as we recently discovered in red-trending states like Kansas, Wisconsin, Ohio and others, and certainly not at the national level.
Haley's personal highlight from the debate came during the topic of our Ukraine policy. Vivek Ramaswami advocated becoming closer to Vladimir Putin, suggesting we give up Eastern Ukraine to Russia, as if it were ours to give. Single-handedly taking a direct swipe at Ramaswami and an indirect swipe at her former boss the exPOTUS, his foreign policy and his love affair with the Soviet dictator, Haley said this:
You don't do that to friends. What you do instead is you have the backs of your friends. Ukraine, it's a front line of defense... Putin has said… once Russia takes Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics are next. That's a world war. We're trying to prevent war. Look at what Putin did today. He killed Prigozhin. When I was at the U.N., the Russian ambassador suddenly died. This guy is a murderer. And you are choosing a murderer over a pro-American country.
Haley's schooling of Ramaswami and her implicit dig at Trump were noteworthy indeed.
It was in fact, she, not Hutchinson nor Christie who delivered the harshest blows against Trump. When the economy, especially the debt and the natural Republican impulse to blame Joe Biden and the Democrats came up, Haley said this:
Donald Trump added 8 trillion to our debt and our kids are never going to forgive us for this. And so at the end of the day, you look at the 2024 budget, Republicans asked for 7.4 billion in earmarks, Democrats asked for 2.8 billion. So you tell me who are the big spenders.
Later in the debate, she laid it all on the line for any Republican willing to listen:
We have to look at the fact that three-quarters of Americans don't want a rematch between Trump and Biden. And we have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America. We can't win a general election that way.
So consensus building was her debate performance that the conservative Haley garnered the notice and even the tepid praise of many liberal commentators. That is, until she raised her hand in the affirmative when the question was posed of the candidates if they would support Donald Trump were he the 2024 Republican nominee AND was convicted in one or more of the 92 felony counts he's facing. That was too much to handle for most of the left of MAGA tribe where the general consensus in the end was that Nikki Haley is a hypocrite.
Is she?
Cynical as it may sound, Nikki Haley is a traditional politician, and a damned good one. Show me a politician who could never be charged with hypocrisy, and I'll show you a losing politician.
Later, when Haley was questioned about that response, she retorted it was irrelevant because she would be the Republican nominee in 2024, not Trump.
She has chutzpah too.
Here's my take on Haley's M.O.
She knows well that Donald Trump is more than likely to be the Republican Party's nominee for president in the 2024 election, regardless of the outcome of his plethora of legal issues.
She also figures that Trump is likely to lose the 2024 general election to Biden, just as he did in 2020. Haley and her team are banking on that and the logic that except for the most steadfast of Trump supporters, most Republicans will have to come to the conclusion that supporting the two-time loser and very likely jailbird Trump is not a good recipe for winning elections or the future of the Republican Party.
If that comes to pass, Nikki Haley may be very well situated to be the Republican standard-bearer in four years, at least compared to the folks who shared the stage with her in Milwaukee two weeks ago. If the results of the last debate are any indication, Haley proved she is capable of standing up to her opponents, often leaving them in the dust. She may not have said a lot to sway the MAGA tribe to her side, but by not discounting Trump entirely, she's shown that while she may not be MAGA, she's also not a RINO. She's also one of the very few Republican candidates who have not been on the receiving end of the wrath of the exPOTUS, thereby maintaining her street cred among the faithful. That may not be enough to help make her the Republican nominee in this cycle, but it may in the next one where the party will be theoretically focusing on someone who can actually win the general election.
History almost guarantees that 40 percent of the voters are assured to vote for the Republican candidate in a presidential election and 40 percent are assured to vote for the Democrat.
That means the election comes down to convincing the remaining 20 percent of the voters who could vote either way.
Nikki Haley showed the nation and potential donors that she is willing to look at the big picture beyond the ultra-right wing talking points that might be helpful to win the Republican nomination but won't work in the general election.
Issues like banning books, endless culture wars, climate change denial, embracing Vladimir Putin, punishing women for having abortions, teaching kids that black people benefited from being slaves, and a whole slew of other extreme positions, just won't cut it with the 20 percent.
But won't her gesture showing tacit support for Donald Trump hurt her?
No, I don't think so. To the 40 percent Republican-or-bust voters, that gesture showed her loyalty to the Party. The twenty percent in the middle, many of whom would vote for a Republican were he or she not so extreme, will have long forgotten it. The only folks who will remember the gesture like me, are in the other forty percent and wouldn't vote for her anyway.
What I just described is only one of many possible scenarios that might take place over the next four years. For one reason or other, I won't speculate which, Trump could drop out of the election and leave the Republican nomination up for grabs. I'm not convinced Haley could pull off a nomination in this cycle, with or without Trump in the race. Or Trump could win the election in November and we may not have any more presidential elections. I say that only partly tongue-in-check. Or Trump could lose and the lunatic fringe could take complete control over the Republican Party. If that happens, all logic gets thrown out the window.
We'll just have to see.
I strongly believe that our democracy thrives with a strong two-party system. For that to work, both parties have to respect one another, to some degree at least, and agree to play by the same set of rules. Right now, one of those parties has gone off the rails and as a result, we are as divided as a nation as we have ever been.
I have lots of issues with Nikki Haley. Beyond ideology is her tendency to speak out of both sides of her mouth whenever it's convenient. Sometimes it's difficult to determine where she truly stands.
Given that, I can't see ever voting for her.
But I could live with a President Haley as someone with whom I could agree to disagree, as I have with all the presidents in my lifetime before the 45th one. The bottom line is I believe she is the best person the Republicans have at the moment to get their party back on track to a semblance of respectability, and perhaps the best person in either party to help bring us back together (as much as that is humanly possible) as a nation.
And boy would that be a good thing.
CODA
*OK I looked it up, Joe Biden ran unsuccessfully for president twice, in 1988 and in 2008. It just seems like more.
**The idea that there are several issues regarding abortion that all of us can agree upon is a little naive as all Americans do not agree that contraception should be readily available, that women should not be punished for having abortions, or that late term abortions should be banned. But I agree with her that we need to reach some kind of consensus on the issue.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/
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