Republicans put the country to sleep
Early last Thursday morning I awoke from a nightmare in a panic.
I dreamed that CNN’s Jake Tapper was asking each Republican presidential debater what breakfast cereal they fancied.
“All of them,” replied Dr. Ben Carson.
“Cap’n Crunch,” said the ever war-minded Ted Cruz.
Fortunately, it was all a bad dream.
The real debate hours before, was no less a night sweat-inducing affair.
There they were; an array of 10 serious-minded presidential aspirants.
Donald Trump was there too.
Three long, long hours of ISIS, Planned Parenthood, the Iran nuclear deal, taxation, immigration and, inexplicably, what Secret Service code names they each preferred.
There should be some kind of rule that if a debate might last longer than a heart transplant, shorten the debate.
Besides, there’d already been a 90 minute “undercard” debate, in which ex-governor George Pataki, ex-senator Rick Santorum and current governor Bobby Jindal, tried to desperately sound as presidential as Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Which they didn’t.
Then came the “Main Event,” that at the outset was more like a pop quiz on all things Trump.
Trump couldn’t have been happier.
In fact, he immediately launched into an unprovoked attack against Sen. Rand Paul, to let us know why he’s the Republican’s presidential frontrunner, especially for people who just love unprovoked attacks.
“First of all, Rand Paul shouldn’t even be on this stage. He’s number 11,” Trump, the self-styled debate coordinator intoned.
Paul shot back something about “junior high school,” as the first of many counterpunches that only served to prevent people from lapsing into comas in the first hour.
Then, there was the combative New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. He’d had enough of the bickering between Trump and ex-Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.
“Let’s stop this childish back and forth between the two of you,” Christie offered.
Of course, that didn’t stop the “childish back and forth” between those two, anyway.
In fact, it was Fiorina who got in one of the best lines of the night when she took Trump on because of his unprovoked attacks on her appearance.
Trump’s entire campaign has been built on his strident attacks on his competitors. Then, he “clarifies” the attacks, claiming he was misunderstood, or worse, misquoted.
“Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president,” he was quoted as saying about Fiorina.
Then came the “clarification.”
He strenuously claimed he was only talking about Fiorina’s “persona.”
Fiorina’s response to Trump’s careless words solidified her as a force to be reckoned with.
“I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said,” she bristled.
The rousing applause (15 full seconds of it) hadn’t died down, when Trump attempted a comeback that failed miserably. “I think she’s got a beautiful face, and I think she’s a beautiful woman,” Trump said to dead silence.
There were the tiffs between Trump and the man many Republicans thought would become the nominee – Jeb Bush.
Once again, Trump became the butt of one of the biggest applause lines of the night.
“Your brother and your brother’s administration gave us Barack Obama because it was such a disaster those last three months that Abraham Lincoln could haven’t been elected,” Trump told Jeb Bush.
Bush shot back, “As it relates to my brother, there’s one thing I know for sure; He kept us safe,” he claimed.
The applause rang out throughout the Ronald Reagan Library.
Bush should have stopped there.
The next sentence stuck a pin in the previous one.
“I don’t know if you remember, Donald – you remember the rubble?” he asked.
Nobody on stage took the bait, and said, if George W. Bush “kept us safe,” then why was there rubble in the first place?
It was a night, though, of winners (Fiorina, Christie and Lindsey Graham), and losers (Trump and perhaps Ted Cruz).
But, curiously, the real winner may just have been Obamacare.
It was at the heart of the Republican’s presidential campaign four years ago.
But it hardly got a mention last Wednesday night.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net
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