Some Thoughts On The Debate

 

BY BUDDY NEVINS

 

 

 

Here is something scary for those of you who watched the Republican debate Thursday night:

President Donald Trump.

President Ben Carson.

President Ted Cruz.

President Rand Paul.

Elect the buffoonish Trump, the lightweight Carson and the truly frightening Cruz and Paul and we could end up in a war, a depression or both.

The Republican debaters also included candidates like Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush and John Kasich who could give Democrats a real race.

Broward Democrats! You don’t want to hear this but it needs to be said. The all-but-anointed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is a deeply flawed candidate. She is eminently beatable.

The fabled Clinton “machine” that put Bill in the White House happened a generation ago. The last time Hillary ran she got beaten by a little-known first term Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama.

Today, there are many questions about Hillary Clinton. Her truthfulness and repeated obfuscations are problems.

Most of all, Clinton is a very, very old story. And the Republicans have fresh faces on the national scene.

Even Kasich, who is not young, is new to most voters outside Ohio and he was impressive last night.

Can you imagine a debate in the General Election between the aging Clinton and the youthful Rubio or Walker? Their vigor immediately puts Hillary at a disadvantage.

What Democrats really should fear is that the long debate process washes out the unqualified Republicans and leaves the GOP with a good candidate.

Because Hillary can be beaten.

 

Bush’s Showing

 

Typically thoughtful and reasoned during the debate but perhaps too low-key for the Republican primary crowd, Jeb Bush needs to fire his stylist. His glasses have got to go.

On Fox TV, the spectacles shaded his eyes and looked ill-fitting. Debates have been won and lost by such missteps in appearance (Richard Nixon in 1960). He should have tested the way they looked on the debate TV before airtime.

 

images

 

Citizen’s United

 

Wall Street Journal had a good insight this week. Because the paper is locked behind an expensive pay wall, the idea deserves repeating here.

Discussing the Citizens United case that allowed large amounts of special interest money into elections, the paper opined that the Supreme Court decision had at least one positive outcome:

It fostered a diversity of candidates in the Republican primary. Without a chunk of special interest money, candidates like Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz wouldn’t be able to compete with the tens of millions raised by Jeb Bush. The public would be robbed of the chance to hear from them during the primaries without Citizens United.

It is an interesting point of view.

Now if only some rich Democrat would use Citizens United to finance an opponent to Hillary.

 

 



21 Responses to “Some Thoughts On The Debate”

  1. Commissioner Angelo Castillo says:

    Buddy,

    In the first debate, I thought Carly Fiorina was by far the class of the bunch. The rest sort of competed for fifth place.

    In the second debate, I thought Rubio clearly stood out followed by Bush. Kasich offered appeal to moderate R’s but that angle is going nowhere.

    Trump was entertaining as everyone expected. The rest didn’t seem to factor much. Overall, I’d have to give the night to Rubio for the best delivery and content for his audience. He’s going to get a lot of votes.

    The rest sort of blended into the background noise. The heated exchanges especially between Christie and Rand came out of nowhere and were fun to watch. They took some pretty good swings at one another which I didn’t really expect.

    To me, those were the standouts and the rest didn’t seem very interesting.

    Most of all, despite the content, I found it refreshing to not hear so much politically correct, canned, plastic political rhetoric. They mostly communicated like real people — forget the content — and I think that’s a good thing.

    By the way, I’m not voting for any of them but that’s what I saw.

    Angelo

    PS — I’ll bet Mitt Romney and John McCain are wearing their “Do You Miss Me Yet” tee shirts today.

    PS — Ted Cruz reminds me of Joe McCarthy on steroids.

    PS — Dr. Carson is a very likable guy but clearly a lightweight, Scott Walker was boring, Rand Paul came off as an oddball, the bible thumping appeared to be less effective this time and, in fairness, Trump did begin saying stuff that made some sense.

  2. zigy says:

    the 4 you knock have one thing in common, a great appeal to the gut, they are saying what many are thinking or feeling, my man is Kasich at this time b ut who knows what the future will bring, im for whomever is willing to keep us out of another useless was in the middle east, let them kill each other, a form of reverse malthusianism or birth control, no more useless wars lets rebuild this country , have fun this is going to be a great political season.

  3. zigy says:

    they all seemed to have a great love for Reagan, never forget it was this great leader who pulled the troops out of Lebanon after the bombings of the barracks. stay out of that cess pool no more boots on the ground let the religion of peace figure this one out without the aid of us kaffirs….

  4. Count LF Chodkiewicz Chudzikiewicz says:

    100% accurate assessment. Maybe Mr. Nevins should be on a news channel instead of the leftist n brightest clowns

  5. City Activist Robert Walsh says:

    First of all Trump is funny. He is just out of control. I think Jeb Bush better get movin. My suggestion is loosin up. Have a drink before you go before these cameras. He comes across as if he is constipated etc. Bush looks very uncomfortable . Kasich did the best. He had the advantage being in his own state that he governs. I think he won hands down. I think Sen.Paul better get rid of that pubic lookin hair on top of his head. Rand Paul did the worst , followed by Chris Christie . Back to Trump for better or worse he stole the show . Blame Bill Clinton.Word has it Clinton encouraged him to run(yes). Lastly Carley Forina (hewett Packard big wig) was center stage, right on in the happy hour debate. She did good. It would not surprise me if she bumps Paul, and Christie. One way to beat Trump or shut him up (same difference) is bring up DOJ investiagation for his Trump University(overcharging people for his courses(joke) and the lawsuit from the Atty.Gen in New York concerning his alleged practices. Oh Trump will pay dearly(watch)….As for now he loves being in the spot light, for how long, will see…..

  6. Dee Dee says:

    Rand Paul is just odd looking to match his odd views. The public won’t buy his Aynn Rand vision of 100 percent total self-reliance, which only works for the rich.

  7. SAM FIELDS says:

    One of the interesting things last night was the difference between the first and second debate. Only the primetime debate had a lot of hardball questions. Generally, I thought FOX did a decent job.

    The clear beneficiary of this underhand pitching in the first debate was Carly Fiorena.
    If she had been in the later debate I bet her first question would have been something like this:

    “You are running on your business acumen. Your most important job was heading Hewlett Packard from 1999 to 2005. You shipped 30,000 jobs to China. Although those were tough tech times and the NASDAQ fell 26%, HP stock dropped 40% from $40 to $23 a share. In the end you were fired.

    Is that the kind of business acumen you intend to bring to the White House?”

    Follow-up questions would involve her corporate yachts, jets and the COMPAC acquisition and why she got a $21 million golden parachute while the company stock went in the crapper.

    The bloom would quickly be off the Carly rose.

  8. An Observation says:

    Being someone that has found pretty much all of the Democratic and Republican candidates comical so far, boy am I going to miss Jon Stewart, I felt that my opinion provides a somewhat objective viewpoint.

    Trump is Trump and he will appeal to a certain segment of voters. I almost felt he was going to say to solve everything just Nuke them all. He has no real plan but he does show his frustration with the present state of politics. They kick it down the road. He was also extremely entertaining so I enjoyed the debate.

    Maybe instead of The Apprentice, the show should be called The Candidate and each week one gets fired. The winner becomes the Republican Nominee.

    Anyone who agrees with a particular candidate will say their candidate did best, but some weren’t really that great.

    Of the rest:

    The Bottom:

    Carson is weak and has no chance, Paul is out somewhere on an island and is so far out of the main stream that he isn’t going anywhere, Cruz (was he really born in Calgary (like Fox said) and if so, why is it legal for him to run) is extreme like Paul but more in a conventional way (sounds good but no clue), and Hucklebee is also like Paul and Cruz but instead of taxes it is social (god) issues.

    The Middle:

    Walker is over his head, Rubio sounds good but needs a lot more work (look for him in 2020 but he may fade unless he can find an office to hold), and Bush seems old and sometimes losing it (he also overstates his accomplishments as does Walker).

    The “at least can prove they did something?”:

    Cristie and Kaisch are the only two that seems like that have any real constructive plans, that while you may not agree with them, they at least have done something. Cristie has some baggage and Kaisch isn’t very exciting, but then I don’t need exciting I need answers to work.

    Final point. I love hearing them say, “I have an X point plan to solve this problem.” If they have a plan, why don’t they actually say it rather than cite it. It’s because either their plan doesn’t exist or doesn’t really say anything. It is just a bunch of ideology and not any realistic constructive alternatives.

    For which ideology is what is driving this whole election and the thing is, we have problems that require solutions, not ambiguous theories that don’t lead to any answers.

    Democrats should still worry, because they got problems too with their candidates.

    FROM BUDDY:

    A president must be a “natural born citizen.” Legal scholars say that means a citizen from birth. Since Cruz’s mother was American, he was a citizen from birth and eligible to run. However, this definition for Cruz hasn’t been ruled upon by a court.

  9. s only says:

    Mr. Nevins,
    In case you haven’t noticed, Hillary is a woman–an experienced, smart, and thoughtful person.
    Look around you—Which gender should run the show? Women are organizers, they do their homework, they are less prone to surface gliding and, very importantly, they do not have that “little” brain that guides men.
    She isn’t young- so what?
    There’s a reason women out live men—They are the stronger of the species.
    She will be the president.
    Wanna bet?

  10. Floridan says:

    Kasich would have the best chance to beat Clinton, but he won’t get that opportunity. Accepting Medicare expansion for the poor of Ohio? Attending a gay wedding?

    Heresy!

  11. Sober As a Judge says:

    Or maybe it means a citizen who was born naturally. Or maybe it means the Constitution needs a clean up act. Or maybe it means there are two classes of citizens in violation of equal protection.

  12. Jack Moss says:

    Once the wackos go, it could be an interesting race.

  13. Chaz Stevens, MAOS says:

    Did you know that Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built the early versions of osciallators, voltmeters, and an atomic clock?

    And they did that from their garage?

    Hewlett and Packard, as in HP.

    In the late 20th century, HP was the Cadillac of test equipment. When you used a piece of their gear, you knew it would do its job superbly … If you only know HP from their printer line, when it came to precision electronic test equipment, there wasn’t a finer piece of hardware available.

    I’ve personally used much of their equipment over the years.

    HP’s line of engineering calculators in the 80s were legendary. In true HP fashion they did things differently, using Reverse Polish Logic (RPL) to enter and operate on numbers. But once you got used to it, you realized how powerful it was, and how easy it made some tricky calculations.

    In the late 90s, HP brought onboard Carly Fiorina as CEO, to help return that company to its once greatness.

    In mid-2001, Fiorina and HP’s directors bet everything on a giant $24B merger with Compaq. At that point, HP had a really strange product line offering — Vectra and a couple other names. In a me-two business, they were just another vendor. And then there was Compaq, a company notorious for its custom-fitted hardware incompatible with industry standards.

    And Compaq keyboards? Imagine trying to type on tofu.

    But I digress.

    The whole merger thing never made sense to me as HP equipment was expensive and PCs were a low margin business.

    The merger was doomed from the start, as the Hewlett and Packard foundations were dead set against this idea. That being said, Fiorina won the day, the merger was complete, and 65,000 new Compaq faces came on board, and would help Fiorina (she thought at the time) reshape HP to her vision.

    And so ended HP as many of us knew it.

    That’s what happens when you put a brass-knuckles sale drone in charge of a hardware company. This has nothing to do with her gender, not in the least, rather it is all about her style, unwillingness to change, and failure to consider the company’s storied past.

    Remember how you felt when Jimmy Johnson banned Shula from the organization? Now multiply that a zillion times.

    Like Sam Fields pointed out, Fiorina shipped jobs offshore and laid off lots of folks. I’d describe her tenure as a “total flop” — she never made HP more competitive, never drove shareholder value, and alienated folks at all levels.

    HP lost its #1 ranking to the upstart Dell.

    To save the day, Fiorina thirce attempted to spin off HP’s uber-successful’s (sorry Stacy Ritter) printer business. She tried to shed the PC business.

    Thankfully, Fiorina was fired three years after the merger — she was better at selling an idea than running a really, really big company.

    A week after her departure, HP shares rose 10%.

    Raise your hand … who wants this twit to run our country?

    FROM BUDDY:

    I can add something, Chaz. A few years ago during the Fiorina era, I bought a HP Printer. It broke shortly after purchase and was still under guarantee, so I attempted to call the help line. The line reached an office somewhere in India or the Philippines or somewhere else. A “service technician” had me go through standard procedures (Disconnect and reboot, etc.) and when that didn’t work, said he couldn’t fix it and transferred me to another “technician.” That technician again had been go through the same list of standard procedures, couldn’t fix it and transferred me again to somebody who went through the same list of procedures again. I felt like I was in the movie “Groundhog Day.”

    So I end up throwing the HP Printer out in frustration and buying myself a Brother. I have never had a problem.

    I would never buy anything from HP again. Their service stinks (And I have had this echoed by one of my friends who bought a laptop and was the phone for hours with them when it broke.)…along with their products.

  14. Maybe! says:

    Kelly continued, “No, it wasn’t. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice that it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?”

    Should have deferred the question to Bill Clinton and Hillary

  15. Ha Ha Ha says:

    Here’s another perspective on that debate:

    If you are one of the wealthiest people in this country, then you had ten candidates talking about your needs for two hours.

    But in the entire time I watched, I saw very little discussion about the issues important to most American families. There was no talk about climate change and clean energy, raising wages and providing healthcare for all Americans, criminal justice reform and the undermining of the Voting Rights Act, and nothing at all about the crushing burden of student debt.

    And when they did talk about campaign finance reform and the billionaire class buying candidates and elections, it was the butt of a Donald Trump joke.

    We need to be discussing issues facing working families at a debate hosted by trade unions. We need to discussing climate change and environmental issues at a forum hosted by the environmental community. We need to be discussing civil rights issues and racial injustice at a forum sponsored by civil rights groups. We need to be discussing gay rights at a forum hosted by the LGBT community. In other words, more discussion, more debate is good for the Democratic Party and good for the American people. …

    Here’s what I did hear a lot about last night: I heard a group of ten Republicans on stage longing for a return to the days of George W. Bush. The return to more war and tax breaks for the rich, and less jobs and health insurance for most American families.

    Do they remember the two wars George Bush put on the credit card?

    I do. Some of us voted no.

    Do they remember the 800,000 jobs a month we were hemorrhaging when Bush left office?

    I do. Some of us voted against the policies that led us there. …

    Bernie Sanders
    https://berniesanders.com/

  16. Talks like a politician says:

    It seems the pendulum that has been stuck on left is slowly swinging back towards the right. Once Clinton falls off the pendulum, the momentum will pick up and some real leadership will emerge.

  17. Ha Ha Ha says:

    Most retweeted GOP debate tweet was written by Bernie Sanders

    The liberal lawmaker’s tweet was retweeted over 20,000 times — over four times the number of retweets received by the second most retweeted tweet, which incidentally also belonged to a Democratic candidate: Hillary Clinton.

    “It’s over. Not one word about economic inequality, climate change, Citizens United or student debt,” Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted as the two-hour-long debate wrapped up. “That’s why the Rs are so out of touch.”

    http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/250571-most-retweeted-gop-debate-tweet-was-written-by-bernie-sanders

  18. PandaBear says:

    Trump’s a riot. He wants his fence up to the clouds, but what do we do with all the tunnels underneath it, and what do we do with our shores? Not to mention that anyone can travel to Canada and then head south to the USA, or straight to Alaska. It’s a very complex issue, because where there’s a will, there’s a way.

  19. What? says:

    So, when Donald Trump confirms previous obnoxious sexist comments about women, and specifically calls out Rosie O’Donnell, it’s hilarious to the crowd. But obnoxious sexist comments towards Megan Kelly are “over the line.” What a principled lot.

  20. Chaz Stevens, Church Goer says:

    Maybe! says:

    Should have deferred the question to Bill Clinton and Hillary.

    Kinda review the meaning of “moral relativism.”

  21. PandaBear says:

    Trump needs to invest in a mouth filter. I know he says the hell with being politically correct, but he needs to remember that above all, he should act like a gentleman, and talk like a gentleman. That’s just basic. He might not be able to control his thoughts, but he should be able to control his mouth.